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WOODROW WILSON 



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WOODROW WILSON 



WOODROW WILSON 



THE STORY OF HIS LIFE 



BY 

WILLIAM BAYARD HALE 

Author of 
"A Week in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt' 




Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

19U 



\\IC 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUniNG THAT OP TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



COPYRIGHT, IQII, I912, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND COMPANY 



THE COtlNTRY LITE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



gCl.A3l27n^ 



CONTENTS 

Chapter 

I. — Background and Boyhood ....... 3 

II. — Boyhood m Georgia 23 

III.— Off to College 43 

IV. — A Student at Princeton 54 

V. — Still Studying Law and Politics .... 77 

VI.— "Professor" Wilson 96 

VII. — ^Princeton's New President 112 

VIII. — Democracy or Aristocracy .f^ 122 

IX.— The Graduate College Contest 139 

X. — Out of Princeton into Politics 160 

XI. — One Year of a Progressive Governor . . 185 

XII. — The Presidency Looms Up 214 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

WooDROW Wilson Frontispiece ^' 

FACING PAGE 

Judge James Wilson 20 

The Rev. Dr. Thomas Woodrow 20 

William Duane Wilson 20 

The Rev. Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson . . 20 ^- 

The Manse, Staunton, Va., where Woodrow 

Wilson was born 104 

The house designed by Woodrow Wilson at 

Princeton 104 

Governor Wilson and His Family . . . .192 



WOODROW WILSON 



WOODROW WILSON 

CHAPTER I 

BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 

IT WAS four years more than a century ago 
that a restless youth of twenty, to whose 
ears had come amazing stories of the oppor- 
tunities to be found in a new land, forsook the 
home of his Scots-Irish fathers in County Down, 
on the Irish shores of the windy North Channel, 
and sailed forth toward the baths of the Western 
stars. Perhaps he had heard of the fame of a 
Scotsman of his own name and without doubt 
his own kin who, having migrated to America 
only a generation before, had become one of the 
founders of the new nation, one of the signers of 
its Declaration of Independence, a member of 
its Constitutional Convention, and a Justice 
of its first Supreme Court. At all events, it 



4 ^^ooDROw wilson 

was on a ship bound for the city of Justice James 
Wilson that young James Wilson sailed. 

The later emigrant may have been destined 
to no such eminence as was the earlier, yet young 
James, too, found his opportunity in the new 
country — found it in a little shop full of the 
smell of printer's ink and mysterious with the 
apparatus of the preservative art — the shop 
at 15 Franklin Court, formerly the home of 
Benjamin Franklin, whence issued, to the en- 
lightenment of the good people of Philadelphia, 
William Duane's daily paper, the Aurora, 

To their enlightenment, it is to be hoped; 
certainly very much to their entertainment and 
their agitation — and not only theirs, but the 
whole country's as well. William Duane was 
the earliest muck-raker in American journalism; 
indeed, he was muck-raking on the other side 
of the world before he had a chance to employ 
Bunyan's celebrated tool here. Though born 
on the shores of Lake Champlain, Duane was 
educated in Ireland, whence he went out to 
India and started a newspaper much occupied 
with arraigning the British Government — 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 5 

which the Government very sensibly seized and 
whose editor they ordered out of the country. 
Returning to Great Britain, he became par- 
liamentary reporter to London papers, including 
the Times. So he was pretty well equipped to 
make trouble when, in 1795, he came back to 
the country of his birth and engaged himself 
with Franklin Bache (grandson of the most 
famous of all Philadelphia printers, and son of 
Richard Bache, the Postmaster-General) on the 
Aurora. Bache dying of the yellow fever, 
Duane took over the widow — and the Aurora. 
It was already a leading Democratic journal, 
Philadelphia being then the national capital. 
Duane made it the chief organ of the party. 
His were the shrieking methods of the yellowest 
day journalism has ever seen, and within a year 
he had been haled before Congress for a viola- 
tion of the Sedition Law. However, he did a 
great deal toward electing Jefferson to the 
Presidency and putting the Democrats in power, 
and even after he had turned into a bitter as- 
sailant of President Madison and had come to 
be regarded as an opposition editor, we find 



6 WOODROW WILSON 

Jefferson writing him (1811), calling him "Col- 
onel" William Duane: 

The zeal, the disinterestedness, and the abilities with 
which you have supported the great principles of our 
revolution, the persecutions you have suffered, and the 
firmness and independence with which you have suffered 
them, constitute too strong a claim on the good wishes 
of every friend of elective government, to be effaced by a 
solitary case of difference in opinion. 

William Duane never got any political reward, 
but his son was made Secretary of the Treasury 
by President Jackson. He served only a few 
months, refusing to obey Jackson's order to 
remove the Government deposits from the United 
States Bank without authority of Congress. 

Duane was in financial difficulties most of 
the time, but he stuck it out until 1822, when 
the country had settled down into an "era of 
good feeling" so paradisiacal that there was 
nothing for a fighting journalist of Irish educa- 
tion to do in the United States. So he closed 
out the Aurora and went on a tour of South 
America, then in the throes of revolution. 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 7 

Such was the employer from whom young 
Jimmie Wilson got his first notions of American 
life. Wilson appears to have taken aptly to the 
printing trade, and to his employer, as his em- 
ployer did to him. The young man prospered. 
He moved from a room in the rear of Fourth 
Street, which he had taken on landing, to 45 
Gaskill Street. And he married — married 
Anne Adams, an Irish girl, four years his junior, 
who had come oVer on the ship that brought 
him. To her latest days she used to love to 
talk of their North of Ireland home, from which 
she said they could see the white linen flying 
on the line in Scotland; so she must have been a 
County Down or a County Antrim lass. There 
was more than the glint of wind-blown linen that 
came across to them from Scotland, for James 
Wilson's wife was a blue-stocking of a Pres- 
byterian to the day of her death, and brought 
up her ten children in the nurture and admoni- 
tion of the Lord in the strictest sect of Pres- 
byterianism. They began life together, No- 
vember 1, 1808, by going to the Rev. Dr. George 
C, Potts, pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian 



s ^YOODRO\^' wilsox 

Church, to be married. AYhen their first child 
was born, they called him "William Duane." 
That year they moved up town to the corner of 
Tenth and Spruce streets; it must have been 
either the northeast or the northwest corner. 

Wilson now became nominally publisher of 
the Aurora. Duane, when the War of 1812 
broke out, was made Adjutant-General of the 
Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and it seems 
that he left the management of the paper to 
Wilson. 

With the Peace of Ghent, a new movement 
westward set in. The Federal Government was 
pushing the National Road over the AUeghanies 
on the first stage of its journey to the plains. 
The steamboat, which had appeared on the 
Hudson in 1808, was now screeching on the 
Ohio. Wilson determined to try his fortunes 
in the hinterland. He went to Pittsburg, just 
growing into a city. Then his fancy was taken 
by the little town of Lisbon, just across the line 
in the new state of Ohio; but soon he found a 
better location in Steubenville, a little below, 
on the river, county seat of Jefferson, nobly 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 9 

named. Here he started a paper of his own — 
the Western Herald it was called — and it was 
destined to a long and measurably influential 
career. 

Behold, then, at the close of the first quarter 
of the nineteenth century, the immigrant James 
Wilson a settled citizen of the state of Ohio, 
influential, prosperous, and at the head of a 
thriving family. 

James Wilson, first and last, must be held 
responsible for a goodly portion of the printed 
wisdom and folly of the early nineteenth century. 
He printed in Philadelphia; he founded a news- 
paper in Steubenville, and in its office he trained 
every one of his seven sons to be an expert com- 
positor; in 1832 he founded a paper at Pittsburg 
— the Pennsylvania Advocate. The first number 
of the Pennsylvania Advocate was printed in 
Ohio, at the Steubenville press. Very soon, 
however, a fine Washington hand-press was 
installed in a Pittsburg office, to the wonder of 
the city, for it was the first press set up west of 
the mountains that was capable of printing a 
double-page form of a newspaper at one impres- 



10 WOODROW WILSON 

sion — that is, one side of a whole sheet at once. 
Mr. Wilson started the Advocate with the aid 
of four of his sons and tw^o apprentice boys, but 
when it was fairly on its feet he left it in the 
immediate charge of his eldest son. 

During the remaining twenty-five years of 
his life James Wilson, an editor to the end, 
divided his time between Steubenville and 
Pittsburg. 

James W^ilson was a man of extraordinarily 
positive opinions; furthermore, he was very out- 
spoken in them. His paper was a very vigor- 
ous publication indeed, discussing the questions 
of the day — and they had pretty big questions 
in the first half of the nineteenth century — 
with fearless conviction and bluntness. The 
editor w^as a Justice of the Peace, and was 
ordinarily addressed as ''Judge" W^ilson. He 
was, for a term, a member of the Ohio State 
Legislature. During his absence at Columbus 
his wafe, with the aid of the sons, edited the 
paper and boarded the hands. 

One of W^ilson's political aversions was the 
person of Samuel Medary, a frequent candidate 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD ll 

for public office. The Western Herald habitually 
referred to him as " Sammedary " — though 
exactly why, no one remembers. A sample of 
the Judge's caustic remarks about this candi- 
date was: 

"Sammedary's friends claim for him the 
merit of having been born in Ohio. So was my 
dog Towser." 

Samuel Medary afterward became Governor 
of Ohio, and (ironically enough) it came about 
that Judge Wilson's son Henry married the 
Governor's daughter. The old Judge attended 
the wedding, and there were greetings amicable, 
but possibly not of unrestrained cordiality, 
between the ancient antagonists. Judge Wilson 
died in Pittsburg during a cholera epidemic, 
in 1837. 

Judge James Wilson had ten children: seven 
boys and three girls. The daughters married 
well, and the sons all attained considerable 
distinction. Henry, Edwin, and Margretta 
were triplets. Henry (he who married Gover- 
nor Medary's daughter) became, during the 
Civil War, Commissary-General on the staff of 



12 WOODROW WILSON 

General Burnside, stationed at St. Louis. Edwin 
studied law with Edwin M. Stanton, at Steuben- 
ville, practised law at Franklin, Pa., and became 
Adjutant-General of Pennsylvania under Gov- 
ernor William F. Packer. 

Edwin and Henry bore a remarkable resem- 
blance to each other; throughout their lives the 
two men were so much alike that few outside 
the family could distinguish one from the other. 
Once, Governor Packer happened to meet Henry 
at the Girard House in Philadelphia, and thinking 
all the time he was w^ith his Adjutant-General, 
Edwin, spent several days with him. On the 
other hand, once, when Edwin was at the old St. 
Nicholas Hotel in New York, General Burnside 
came along and proceeded to administer a 
reprimand to the officer whom he took to be 
his Commissary-General for having left head- 
quarters without leave. Edwin let Burnside 
exhaust himself, and then asked: 

''General, when did you see me last!" 

Burnside replied: "Why, I left you at St. 
Louis, last week." 

Edwin retorted: ''You are mistaken." 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 13 

"Aren't you General Wilson?" asked Burn- 
side. 

"I am so called," replied Edwin, "but I am 
very thankful that I am not your Commissary- 
General." 

Before Burnside could be persuaded of his 
mistake, a visit had to be made to the hotel 
register; the writing of the two men was totally 
unlike, and Burnside was familiar with the hand 
of Gen. Henry Wilson. General Henry and 
General Edwin distinguished themselves to 
their acquaintances by the manner in which 
they w^ore their watch guards: Henry wore a 
chain about his neck, while Edwin wore a fob. 

One of the earliest photographs made in 
Columbus was a portrait of Gen. Henry Wilson. 
Henry sent it to General Edwin, at Harrisburg, 
and he, by way of practical joke, sent it home 
to his wife, as a likeness of himself. Mrs. 
Wilson hung it on the parlor wall and proudly 
called the attention of callers to the excellent 
photograph of her husband. 

Judge Wilson's youngest son w^as Joseph 



U W'OODROW WILSON 

Ruggles — through whom runs the special cur- 
rent of this story. 

Joseph was born at Steubenville on February 
28, 1822; he got his first schooKng in his father's 
shop. Like all the other sons, he learned the 
printer's trade — not one of them but could, to 
the day of his death, "stick t^^e" with any 
journeyman. 

It is recorded of Edwin Wilson that, later in 
life, he made a wager with the proprietor of the 
Venango Spectator that he could set the longest 
"string of i}ipe in an hour." At it they went, 
and the General was an easy winner — and he 
was not the fastest "sticker" in the family, 
either. Joseph was allowed, as a boy, to get 
out a little paper of his own from the Western 
Herald ofiice. 

Joseph, from the start, was marked for the 
scholar of the family. There was a good 
academv at Steubenville, and he attended it. 
At eighteen he went to Jefferson College, a 
Presbyterian institution at Canonsburg, Pa. 
(now merged in Washington and Jefferson 
College), where he was graduated in 1844 as 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 15 

valedictorian. He engaged in teaching for a 
year, taking charge of an academy at Mercer, 
Pa. But the call was clear to a higher life work. 
Before he had left home for college he had made 
a public profession of his faith in the First 
Presbyterian Church of his native town. Now 
he took his way to the Western Theological 
Seminary, at Allegheny, Pa., remained a year, 
and then went to spend another year at Prince- 
ton Seminary. He w^ent home, and w^as licensed 
to preach, although not yet ordained; he taught 
for two years in the Steubenville Male Academy. 
To the fact that there was another Steuben- 
ville academy is due the necessity of telling this 
story. There w^as another, not for males, and 
to it there came, among other girls of the Ohio 
Valley, a damsel from Chillicothe, the pretty 
town which was Ohio's first capital, lying be- 
tween the pleasing hills behind which the sun 
still rises on the state seal. Janet Woodrov/ 
was her name, though most people called her 
"Jessie," and she was the daughter of a great 
and famous Presbyterian minister of the day, 
but neither did that nor her English birth forbid 



16 WOODROW WILSON 

her having a gleeful laugh and an eye for fun. 
One afternoon, the lessons at Doctor Beattie's 
school being over, Janet Woodrow took a walk; 
passing by the Wilson house, she spied, through 
the pickets of the garden fence, the young theo- 
log, raking, in a pair of kid gloves. On the 
7th day of June, 1849, Joseph R. Wilson and 
Janet Woodrow were legally joined in marriage 
by Thomas W^oodrow, minister of the Gospel 
— so attests an entry preserved in the marriage 
records of the Probate Court of Ross County, 
Vol. F., page 91. 

We have another immigration to observe: 
The W^oodrows (or W^odrows, as they spelled it 
in Scotland) are an ancient family originally 
out of England, who trace their Scottish history 
back 600 years. Among them flourished min- 
isters, scholars, and men of substance, with 
a Presbyterian martyr or two. The Rev. Dr. 
Thomas Woodrow, born at Paisley in 1793, a 
graduate of Glasgow University, recrossed the 
Tweed to become minister of the Independent 
Congregation at Carlisle, England. After hav- 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 17 

ing served there sixteen years and begotten 
eight children he felt the call to become a mis- 
sionary in the New World. 

Accordingly he embarked, the 21st of October, 
1835, on a ship bound for New York. All his 
family was with him: his wife, Marion (born 
Williamson), and their children: Robert, John, 
Thomas, William, Janet, George, and Marion, 
ranging from fifteen years of age down to three. 
One day little Janet was on deck; she happened 
to be clutching a rope when a big wave hit the 
ship, buried her bow in the water, and sent the 
little maid far out over the sea; however, she 
held on fast and escaped with a good wetting. 

All landed safely after a passage of ten weeks, 
having spent Christmas and New Year's Day 
at sea. Shortly after the landing, however, we 
find this passage in the Doctor's diary: 

New York, U. S., February 23, 1836. 
Little did I expect that the first death I should have to 
record on my arrival in this country should be that of my 
dear wife. How mysterious and distressing often are the 
ways of God. I landed in this country on the 12th day 
of January, 1836, with my dear wife and family, and on 



18 WOODROW WILSON 

the 16th Inst, the faithful and affectionate companion of 
my travels was taken from me by a sudden and unex- 
pected stroke. I had the melancholy satisfaction yester- 
day of committing her dear, sweet body to the cold and 
silent tomb. Her body was interred in the Oliver Street 
Church (Baptist) Burial Ground in a dry, sandy grave, 
where it lies until the morning of the Resurrection, when 
at the sound of the last trumpet it shall be raised up a 
glorious and incorruptible body, and when I hope I shall 
meet my dear love and join with her and all the redeemed 
in praising God and the Lamb. 

However, the good man went on to his desti- 
nation — Canada — where, with headquarters 
at Broekville, on the St. Lawrence, he fulfilled 
for a while the duties of a missionary through a 
wide circuit of country. In a year came an 
invitation to the pastorate of the First Presby- 
terian Church of Chillicothe, and the Woodrows 
came into the States. The Doctor's ministry 
at Chillicothe stretched from 1837 to April, 
1849. While there he married a second time, 
in 1843, the bride being Harriet L. Renick, 
widow of Asahel Renick. From Chillicothe 
he went to Columbus, where he was pastor of 
the Hogg First Presbyterian Church. He died 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 19 

at Columbus April 27, 1877, and was buried in 
Greenlawn Cemetery. 

The history of the Presbytery of Chillieothe 
says of the Rev. Dr. Woodrow that he 

Was a fine scholar, a good preacher, and especially 
powerful in prayer. He was conservative in his views and 
thoroughly presbyterian in his belief. His sermons 
were always instructive and pointed. He loved to dwell 
on the great cardinal doctrines of the Gospel and to pro- 
claim them in their simplicity and fulness. 

Doctor Woodrow was a stocky man, of short 
stature — very vigorous in the pulpit. A man 
now in middle life remembers hearing him preach 
a sermon in the chapel of the Presbyterian 
Church of Augusta, Ga., on a very warm day 
— the church was, in fact, that presided over 
by the Rev. Joseph R. Wilson, as we shall see. 
Doctor Woodrow had lost or misplaced his 
spectacles, and so the Rev. Mr. Wilson 
canvassed the congregation for a pair that would 
suit the preacher. He brought to the pulpit 
a variety of spectacles. There was only one 
pair through which the dominie could see his 



20 WOODROW WILSON 

manuscript. These were too big for him and, 
as he preached, they kept sHpping down his 
nose, which was also the course of the perspira- 
tion that gathered on the preacher's forehead. 
A httle boy in a front row sat fascinated by the 
sight of the spectacles slowly travelling down 
the parson's nose and amazed at the dexterity 
with which he managed to catch them at the 
last minute, push them up and go on with the 
unbroken discourse.* 

Two weeks after his marriage with Jessie 
Woodrow, Joseph Ruggles Wilson was ordained 
by the Presbytery of Ohio. It w^as several years, 

*0f Dr. Thomas Woodrow's children, one son, James, had a rather remarkable career: 
He graduated at Jefferson College, where he was a classmate of Basil Gildersleeve, who 
has taught Latin and Greek to most of the living generation of Americans. Then he 
became a minister of the Presbyterian Church. His real interest, however, seemed to 
have been in science, and he went to Heidelberg University, where he achieved such dis- 
tinction that he was invited to remain as a professor in succession to the celebrated 
Bunsen. Coming home, however, he became instead a professor at the Southern Pres- 
byterian Theological Seminary at Columbia, S. C, his chair being denominated, in 
accordance with a leading thought of that day, that of "the Relation Between Science 
and Religion." His views on the subject of evolution becoming more pronounced, they 
aroused dissatisfaction, and he was obliged to resign. Then he was chosen president of 
South Carolina College. Later he became a bank president, and as such ended his days. 

Of the other children, Robert developed phenomenal scholarship, but died in the early 
twenties. Thomas was a man of considerable ability and of unusual nobility of char- 
acter. He lived a quiet, self-sacrificing life. Cut out for a scholar, the necessities of the 
family forced him into business, and he lived as a gentleman storekeeper. William was 
a sort of rolling stone, but when, in the course of his wanderings, he reached Nebraska, 
he got hold of land that proved to be of value and acquired considerable fortune. The 
daughter Marion married James Bones, of Augusta, Ga. A new acquaintance, once loth 
to accept the homely patronymic of Marion Wilson's husband, undertook to address him 
as Mr. Bone. He was instantly rebuked with the words: "No, just dry Bones." 





THE REV. DR. THOMAS \yOODRO\V 




THE REV. DR. JOSEPH RUGGLES 
WILLIAM DUANE ^VILSON WILSON 

GRANDFATHERS, UNCLE AND FATHER OF WOODROW WILSON 



BACKGROUND AND BOYHOOD 21 

however, before he undertook a pastorate of 
any consequence, serving for a year as "pro- 
fessor extraordinary" of rhetoric in Jefferson 
College, and for four years as professor of 
chemistry and natural sciences in Hampden- 
Sydney College, Virginia, in the meantime sup- 
plying small neighboring churches. The Rev. 
Mr. Wilson had become the father of two 
daughters, Marion and Annie Josephine, before 
he was called as pastor to Staunton, Va., in 1855. 
Staunton, where he remained for tw^o years, was 
a tow^n of 5,000 population, beautifully situated 
in the famous Valley of Virginia. 

Here it was that on December 28, 1856, 
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born. 

The infant Wilson (to spend a moment re- 
viewing his parental history) was born to an au- 
spicious heritage. His blood w^as Scotch-Irish, 
a strain perhaps the most vigorous physically, 
the most alert mentally, the most robust morally 
of all those that have mingled in the shaping of 
the American character. His forebears were 



22 WOODROW WILSON 

men and women who had conspicuously dis- 
played the qualities of a sturdy race: they were 
people imaginative, hopeful, venturesome; stub- 
born, shrewd, industrious, inclined to learning, 
strongly tinctured with piety, yet practical and 
thrifty. On one side they were an ancient 
family who had preserved the memory of a part 
in large affairs, who for generations had carried 
the banner of religion and learning — the para- 
mount concerns of Scottish men. On the other 
side they had had their share in the public 
affairs of a more modern nation. The new-born 
was descended from clergymen and editors; 
men of strong opinions; men likewise accustomed 
to give free leave to their opinions. They were 
protestants in religion, and in politics, radicals: 
pioneers — a stout-hearted breed. 

Such was the ancestral preparation for life 
of the little son of the Presbyterian pastor who 
came into the world Christmas week, 1856, in 
the dawn of an ample day of national evolution 
and conflict. 



CHAPTER II 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 



IN THE spring of 1858, Thomas Woodrow 
Wilson being then two years old, the family 
moved to Augusta, Ga., where the father was 
to be pastor of the Presbyterian Church for the 
next four years. 

With his entrance upon the Augusta pastorate, 
the Rev. Mr. Wilson became one of the most 
noted ministers in the South. Thoroughly 
equipped in the theology of his denomination, 
a pulpit orator of great power and a personality 
of extraordinary force, he early reached and long 
maintained a position of much influence. When 
the war came on, he embraced, with all the 
strength of his character, the Southern side. 
At the division of the Presbyterian Church into 
Northern and Southern branches, he invited 
the first General Assembly of the latter to meet 

23 



24 WOODROW WILSON 

in his church, and became its permanent clerk. 
Twenty-five years later Doctor Wilson gave a 
description of the scene when, in that assembly, 
the chairman on the committee appointed to 
prepare an address justifying the separation, 
rose to speak: 

The thrill of that hour is upon me now. The house was 
thronged, galleries and floor. The meagre person of the 
intellectual athlete (Dr. Thornwell) occupied a small space 
in the front of the pulpit, and so near as to gain from the 
framework a partial support, for even now he felt the 
approach of fatal disease. Every eye was upon him, and 
every sound was hushed as by a spell whilst for forty 
historic minutes this Calvin of the modern Church poured 
forth such a stream of elevated utterance as he of Geneva 
never surpassed, his arguments being as unanswerable as 
they were logically compact. 

In 1865, Doctor Wilson was styled "Stated 
Clerk" of the Southern Presbyterian General 
Assembly, and he continued to be such until 
1899, when he resigned, being then seventy- 
seven years old and having kept the Southern 
Presbyterian records for nearly forty years. He 
was moderator of the assembly in 1879. He 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 25 

died at Princeton, N. J., in his eighty-first 
year.* 

Mr. Wilson had been a professor of rhetoric, 
and he always remained one, taking very seri- 
ously, and practising with a sense of its sanc- 
tity, the art of words. He read his sermons, 
every one of which was marked by high literary 
finish, although in no sense unduly rhetorical. 
A man of unusual scholarship and a student to 
the end of his days, he is remembered to have 
indulged in but a single form of pedantry; his 
regard for language had inclined him affec- 
tionately toward the original significance of 
words, and he was sometimes observed to use 
them in an antiquated sense. Thus he occasion- 
ally indulged in such a phrase as, '"I wonder with 
a great admiration." Charles Lamb used to do 
the same thing, as you will learn if you will read y^i^ 
the first sentence of "Imperfect Sympathies." Y\^ 

* Of the Rev. Dr. Wilson's children other than Woodrow, the elder daughter, Marion, 
married the Rev. Ross Kennedy, a Presbyterian minister, who died in Augusta, Ark., 
some years ago. The younger daughter, Annie Josephine, became the wife of a physician 
and surgeon of Colvunbia, S. C, Dr. George Howe. Mrs. Howe is now living, a widow, 
in Raleigh, N. C. A second son, and fourth child, Joseph R., was born ten years after 
Woodrow. After leaving college, Joseph R. Wilson went to Nashville, Tenn., where he 
has made himself a name as a political writer of influence in state affairs. He is now city 
editor of the Nashville Banmr. 



^6 WOODROW WILSON 

WTien indulging in his harmless foible the 
preacher might have been caught glancing 
around the congregation to catch, if it might be, 
the pleasure of an appreciative gleam in some 
hearer's eye. He was a man of humor as well 
as of learning and thought, and, when his son 
had grown to discerning years, always showed 
great delight if the boy evinced, by repeating it, 
that he remembered some fanciful or eloquent 
or learned phrase. 

Mr. Wilson used to speak with contempt of 
the florid style of oratory, and even early in 
life his son was trained to consciousness of the 
absurdity of high-falutin rhetoric. He remem- 
bers to-day as one of the funniest things he saw 
as a boy the peroration which a florid preacher 
made in his father's pulpit. The visitor had risen 
rather rapidly to extreme heights of eloquence, 
and, trembling on the dizzy cliffs, having exhaust- 
ed all the superlatives of the language and all the 
figures of speech within his knowledge — and 
his voice as well — he achieved his climax by 
means of a whistle and a spiral upward move- 
ment of his forefinger, as indication of the course 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 27 

of a skyrocket. Thus the imagination could 
follow whither voice and rational thought could 
no further proceed. 

The city of Augusta in the decade 1860-70 
was a community of about 15,000 souls. It was 
not as distinctively southern a city as might be 
imagined, being then a place of rolling mills, 
furnaces, railroad shops, where the cotton trade 
also flourished, and cotton spinning mills were 
busy. 

The First Presbyterian Church stood, as it 
stands to-day, in the middle of a lot occupying 
an entire square on Telfair Street. (To-day, 
the Telfair Sunday-school building has been 
built by the side of the old church.) The church 
was, and is, a dignified and even imposing edifice. 
It was, and is, surrounded by a beautiful grove. 
The congregation was the most influential, in 
point of numbers and wealth, in the city. The 
sewing circle was a social factor among the ladies 
of Augusta. The Sunday-school, which then 
met in a building at the corner of Ellis and Mc- 
intosh Streets, was a large one. Its super- 



28 WOODROW ^\7LS0X 

intendent became the Rev. Mr. ^Yilson's brother- 
in-law; he was Mr. James W. Bones. 

Diagonally across from the church was the 
parsonage — a two-stor\% brick building, rather 
a mansion in proportions, surrounded by stable, 
outbuildings, and wall, all of red brick. 

Tommie Wilson's earhest recollected impres- 
sion had to do with the breaking out of the Civil 
War. On a certain day in November, 1860, the 
httle boy, playing on the gate before his father's 
house, saw two men meet on the sidewalk and 
heard one of them cr^': '* Lincoln is elected, 
and there'll be war I"' This is the earliest rec- 
ollection of Woodrow Wilson. Something in 
the shrill tone of the speaker struck for the first 
time a chord of lasting memory'. 

Yet Woodrow Wilson remembers little, almost 
nothing, of the war. Augusta was on an island 
around which flowed the current of the conflict. 
It was never occupied by Federal troops until 
reconstruction days. Xo refugees ever fled to it. 
The man does remember that the boy saw a 
troop of men in ever\' sort of garb, mounted on 
every sort of horse, ride past the house one day 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 29 

on their way to join the Confederate Army. 
They were not a terrifying or glorious spectacle. 
The boy cried after them in a slang exclamation 
of the day: " Go get your mule ! " 

He does remember the scarcity of the food 
supply that came on as the war progressed. Not 
that there was not enough food, but it was greatly 
restricted in variety. The restriction was not 
always unhappy, for it encouraged the ingenuity 
of housekeepers and taught them the edible 
quality of some things heretofore scorned. The 
delicious taste of the soup made from the cow- 
peas, previously fed only to the cattle, lingers 
to this day in the mouth of the little boy who 
tasted it. 

Once when rumors came into the city of an 
approaching army (Sherman was threatening 
Augusta), a company of gentlemen armed them- 
selves and marched valiantly out of town in the 
direction of the oncoming host. They lay all 
night on their arms in the woods and probably 
had a very enjoyable picnic of it, while their 
wives and families were waiting anxiously at 
home for news. The son of the Presbyterian 



30 WOODROW WILSON 

pastor remembers the anxiety, the prayers, the 
unextinguished lamp in the parsonage all night. 
The brave defenders of their homes and firesides 
returned unensanguined ; the army never came. 

Wilson remembers a little pile of plug tobacco 
boxes of thick wood, tightly clamped with tin, 
reposing in a corner of the attic, growing in size 
from time to time. These were days when 
careful stewards were putting all their spare 
resources into cash or the equivalent of cash for 
savings, and the funds of not a few were turned 
into plug tobacco, that being an asset easily 
convertible into money. The parson, too, had 
his little horde of gold. 

There was another war event that made its 
impression upon the boy: In the summer of 
'65 he saw Jefferson Davis ride by, under guard, 
on his way to Fortress Monroe. 

After '65, Doctor W^ilson's church was occu- 
pied temporarily by Federal soldiers. How- 
ever, such hardships as the city of Augusta 
suffered through the war were nothing compared 
with those endured in most parts of the South. 
It is to this fact that is to be attributed the small 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 31 

part in Woodrow Wilson's education played by 
the passions of the great conflict. He was only 
nine years old when the war ended. He was, 
too, apparently, a boy who somewhat tardily 
developed strong convictions. In short, he was 
a real boy while he was a boy, more concerned 
in the games of his crowd than in the principles 
of a war of which they saw little. 

The Wilson boy was, his companions say, an 
active little fellow. It was a peculiarity that 
he was always running; he seemed incapable of 
proceeding from point to point otherwise. He 
can scarcely be said to have walked until he was 
fourteen or fifteen years old. 

One of the thrilling moments of the boy's early 
life was the day and evening when the first street 
car came down the streets of Augusta. The 
cars were of the bobtail variety with a box for 
nickels up in front. At first, for the boys, the 
chief use and purpose of this new wonder was 
the manufacture of scissors out of crossed pins 
laid on the track. By night — the electric 
light had not then turned night into day — the 



32 WOODROW WILSON 

glimmering red, purple, and green lights carried 
by the cars afforded endless pleasure as they 
approached and receded. The boys, too, made 
friends with the drivers and went along with 
them on their trips, being allowed sometimes to 
work the brakes and to turn the switches. 

A little later Tom learned the delight of the 
saddle. Doctor Wilson kept a big black 
buggy horse, which Tommy used to ride — 
"conservatively," says his old playmate. Pleas- 
ant A. Stovall, now president and editor of the 
Savannah Press and one of the leading men of 
the state. Pleasant Stovall was prone to get 
many a tumble as the two lads rode through the 
streets and suburbs of Augusta, and used to 
wonder how his canny playmate got none. 

The stable or barn and the lot enclosed by the 
parsonage offices were a favorite resort for all 
the boys of the neighborhood, among whom 
W^ilson was a natural leader. He and Pleasant 
Stovall organized a club among the lads and 
called it the "Lightfoot Club." The chief 
activities of this fellowship seem to have been 
the playing of baseball with other nines of town 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 33 

boys and the holding of meetings characterized 
by much nicety of parhamentary procedure. 
Every one of the Httle chaps knew perfectly well 
just what the ''previous question" was; knew 
that only two amendments to a resolution could 
be offered; that these were to be voted on in 
reverse order, and all the rest of it. The chief 
ornament of the clubroom was a highly colored 
presentation of his Satanic Majesty, originally 
an advertisement from a brand of deviled ham. 
The "Lightfoots" practised and played occa- 
sional match games in the grounds of the Acad- 
emy of Richmond County, on Telfair Street, 
just below the church. 

The city of Augusta, founded by Oglethorpe, 
was a pleasant, even beautiful place, with its 
broad, well-shaded streets — one of them a 
boulevard on which stands a monument to 
Georgia's Signers of the Declaration — but 
rather wanting in bold or picturesque features. 
The Savannah River at that point is broad, the 
bank is barren, and the current heavy with red 
clay. As romantic a spot as the city possessed 
was the grove in which the church stood — a 



34 WOODROW WILSON 

place of solemn shade and mysterious whisper- 
ings, often the resort of the dreaming boy. 

In the neighborhood of the town, at the point 
now called Summerville, was a delightful sub- 
urban spot, then known merely as the "Sand 
Hills," where Wilson's uncle, James Bones, who 
had married Marion Woodrow, Woodrow Wil- 
son's aunt, had a country house. Wilson and 
Pleasant St o vail used to ride out to the "Sand 
Hills" on horseback and spend a great deal of 
their time in the pleasant country. Mrs. W^ilson 
frequently spent a summer in the North, and 
when she was away from home the boy went out 
to live with his aunt in the Sand Hills. 

The daughter of the house, Jessie Woodrow 
Bones (she is now Mrs. A. T. H. Brower of 
Chicago), was a great tomboy and idolized her 
cousin, and the two spent many a long happy 
summer day at play in the woods. Long before 
she knew a letter, he had filled her mind and 
imagination with the "Leather Stocking Tales," 
and what he read to her or told her in the twi- 
light on the veranda they acted out in their play 
next day. Casting aside all the encumbrances 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 35 

of civilization except that which conservative 
authority in the shape of the aunt and mother 
required, they stained their faces, arms, and legs 
with pokeberry juice and, with head-dresses of 
feathers and armed with bows and arrows, crept 
out of the house and stationed themselves by the 
side of a lonely road leading from Augusta to a 
negro settlement in the piney woods. Here 
they would lie in wait until chance brought them 
their victims in the shape of little darkies on their 
way to town with bundles of lightwood on their 
heads. Then, with blood-curdling war-whoops, 
they would dash out upon the unsuspecting prey, 
brandishing wooden tomahawks in frightful 
fashion. The pair of youthful savages never 
made any captives and had to console themselves 
by remembering that kinky wool would not 
make attractive scalps to hang at their belts. 
When no victims were forthcoming, little Jessie 
had to impersonate the hated white man, and 
she was invariably caught, made to run the 
gauntlet, scalped, and burned at the stake by 
the bloodthirsty red-man. 

On other occasions, the little girl had to enact 



36 WOODROW WILSON 

the part of various kinds of game. Once she 
was supposed to be a squirrel in the top of a tree. 
So good a marksman was her cousin that she was 
hit by an arrow and came tumbhng to the ground 
at his feet. The terrified Httle hunter carried 
her hmp body into the house with a conscience 
torn as it probably never has been since, crying : 
''I am a murderer. It wasn't an accident. I 
killed her." Young bones are supple, and the 
little girl had happily sustained no injury. 

Mr. Bones's house stood next to the United 
States Arsenal, which, after the close of the war, 
was occupied by the Federal troops. Tommy 
and Jessie never tired of going to the guard- 
house, at the entrance to the arsenal grounds, to 
look at the soldiers and talk with them. One 
day, however, Jessie's mother explained to her 
that those friends of theirs were Yankees and 
had fought against the South. It was a great 
blow to the couple, and they often discussed the 
feasibility of converting the Yankees into Pres- 
byterians — all good people being Presbyterians 
and all wicked ones Yankees. 

Tom Wilson, for one reason or another, was not 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 37 

taught his letters until long past the date at which 
most youngsters have learned to read. It may 
have been that his mother, who had been stren- 
uously taught in her young years in England and 
who used in later life to speak feelingly of the 
folly of having to learn Latin in one's sixth year, 
had ideas of her own about forcing the young 
intellect. It may have been his father, who was 
a man of very great positiveness and originality 
of opinion, was averse to having his son get his 
first glimpses into the world of knowledge other- 
wise than through himself. But, however it 
came about, Tom Wilson was not taught his 
alphabet until he was nine years old. There was 
a great deal of reading aloud in the family, not 
only his father and mother, but his two sisters 
frequently reading him choice extracts from 
standard books. Sir Walter Scott and Dickens 
were made familiar to the lad in this way: he 
remembers still the pleasure which his father 
showed in '* Pickwick," reading the instalments 
aloud, with Mrs. Wilson as the special audience, 
though even at the early age of eight the boy re- 
members that he appreciated much of the humor 



38 WOODROW WILSON 

of the young author — just as Dickens himself 
asserted that at the same age he appreciated the 
humor of some of the situations which he later 
recorded in ''Pickwick Papers." 

The lad attended the best schools Augusta 
offered. Public schools were either non-existent 
or so poor as to be worthless, so the boy was put 
at an institution kept by Prof. Joseph T. Derry, 
with a habitation over the post-office on Jackson 
Street. Its pupils played in the old "burnt lot" 
near the bell tower. Later, Professor Derry 
moved his school to a building on the river bank 
next to some cotton warehouses. Here the boys 
made the warehouses their playgrounds, explor- 
ing and playing hide-and-seek among the cotton 
bales. It is still a recollection that the young- 
sters of that day, when bent upon some boyish 
prank, found that a pad gathered from the 
cotton bales was an effective protection from 
deserved punishment. 

Joseph Rucker Lamar, now an Associate 
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United 
States, was a pupil of Professor Derry at about 
the same time. Joe Lamar was the son of 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 39 

another minister in the city — the Rev. James 
S. Lamar, pastor of the Christian Church, who 
hved in a house on Mcintosh Street next to the 
Wilsons. There were two Lamar boys, Joe and 
Phil, and they were rather given to squabbling. 
Joe was the bigger, but Phil was an active little 
chap, and when Joe was administering a "lick- 
ing," he would grow so enraged that his contor- 
tions provoked Joe to such laughter that he 
would fall down and helplessly allow the smaller 
i)oy to administer the drubbing. Other school- 
mates of Tom Wilson were William A. Keener, 
sometime professor of law at Harvard and later 
dean of the Columbia University Law School. 
Still another was William Doughty, now a 
physician of Augusta. 

Prof. John T. Derry, much beloved of all his 
pupils, had returned home from four years in 
the Confederate Army to teach. He is the 
author of several books and is now in the Agri- 
cultural Department of the State of Georgia. 
Mr. Derry says that Tom Wilson was a quiet, 
studious boy, and he speaks with the greatest 
delight of the Augusta days. "Thirty -five 



40 WOODROW WILSON 

years," he says, "I spent in teaching, fourteen 
instructing boys in Augusta, seventeen as 
professor of languages and history in Wesleyan 
Female College at Macon, Ga., and four years 
teaching boys and girls in Atlanta. Among my 
pupils I can count a governor (Woodrow Wil- 
son); a justice of the United States Supreme 
Court (Joseph Lamar) ; Congressmen; legislators, 
sons, daughters, and wives of generals, governors, 
senators, and representatives. But no part of 
my career as a teacher gives me more pleasure 
than the memory of the select classical school on 
the banks of the Savannah at Augusta, Ga." 

But young Wilson's real instructor during the 
Augusta days was his father. Long before the 
age at which boys are imbibing knowledge from 
books he was already receiving from the lips of 
his father an education more varied, more prac- 
tical and sound than any that could otherwise 
have come to him. 

Father and son were constant companions, 
but it was Sunday afternoons that the elder 
devoted particularly to his son's training. Then, 
sitting on the floor, or rather reclining there 



BOYHOOD IN GEORGIA 41 

against an inverted chair, the gifted parson 
poured out into the ears of the spellbound lad 
all the stores of his experience, learning, and 
thought. He was a man of wide information on 
the affairs of the world, a judge of good literature, 
a master of the queen of the sciences, theology, 
and, withal, a man of much imaginative power 
— mingling with the warp of sound and well- 
founded thought the woof of picturesque fancy. 
Above all, the elder Wilson had a clean-working 
mind. He had a way of recognizing facts, and 
the processes of his thought dealt with them in 
the light of reason. If the boy had learned 
nothing else, he would have been happy indeed 
to have been guided from the beginning into the 
ways of clear, cold thinking. 

And Doctor Wilson was a master of the Eng- 
lish language. He believed that nobody had a 
thought until he could put it quickly and def- 
initely into words. This he did himself, and 
this he taught his son to do. So that when 
the boy came to learn the written symbols in 
which speech is set down he was learning only 
a method of recording and transmitting a Ian- 



42 WOODROW WILSON 

guage which he already was well able to 
handle. 

On Mondays the father would almost without 
exception take his son out with him on some 
excursion in the city or neighboring country. 
On a Monday the two would visit the machine 
shops; Tom would be shown furnaces, boilers, 
machinery; taught to follow the release of power 
from the coal to the completion of its work in 
a finished product of steel or of cotton. He re- 
members to this day the impression made upon 
him then by the gigantic engines, the roar of 
furnaces, or the darting up of sheets of flame; 
he remembers great forges presided over by 
sooty -faced imps. In this fashion, by a contin- 
ual round of visits of inspection in which the 
sight of visible things and visible processes was 
the text of running lectures on the principles 
of nature, chemistry, physics, and of the or- 
ganization of human society, the boy learned 
what he would have had great diflSculty in 
learning from books alone. 



CHAPTER III 

OFF TO COLLEGE 

THE Wilsons moved from Augusta to 
Columbia, S. C, in the autumn of 1870, 
the Rev. Dr. Wilson resigning his pas- 
torate in order to become a professor in the 
Southern Presbyterian Theological Seminary. 
His chair was that of pastoral and evangelistic 
theology. He retained it four years. 

Columbia is a statutory — an artificial — city, 
its location having been determined by the 
desire of South Carolina to have a capital in the 
exact centre of the state. Neither city nor sur- 
rounding country offered the opening mind of the 
boy much of suggestion or inspiration. 

Tom appears to have retreated here into the 
more exciting scenes of an imaginative life. He 
forsook in mind the streets of the commonplace 
town and the dreary banks of the Congaree, and 
adventured forth in search of exploits in far-off 

43 



44 WOODROW WILSON 

lands. All boys do something of the sort, but 
there can be no doubt that, in the case of this 
young dreamer, the exercise of imagination was 
constant and vivid and that during a great part 
of his days he lived, so far as his mind was con- 
cerned, in one or another of the various char- 
acters which he had invented and assumed. 

Thus for many months he was an Admiral 
of the Navy, and in that character wrote out 
daily reports to the Navy Department. His 
main achievement in this capacity was the dis- 
covery and destruction of a nest of pirates in 
the Southern Pacific Ocean. It appears that 
the Government, along with all the people of the 
country, had been terrified by the mysterious 
disappearance of ships setting sail from or ex- 
pected at our Western ports. Vessels would set 
out with their precious freight, never to be heard 
from again, swallowed up in the bosom of an 
ocean on which no known war raged, no known 
storms swept. Admiral Wilson was ordered to 
investigate with his fleet. After an eventful 
cruise they overtook, one night, a piratical look- 
ing craft with black hull and rakish rig. Again 



OFF TO COLLEGE 45 

and again the chase eluded the Admiral. Finally 
the pursuit led the fleet to the neighborhood of 
an island uncharted and hitherto unknown. 
Circumnavigation seemed to prove it bare and 
uninhabited, with no visible harbor. There was, 
however, a narrow inlet which seemed to end at 
an abrupt wall of rock a few fathoms inland. 
Something, however, finally led the Admiral to 
send a boat into this inlet — and it was dis- 
covered that it was the cunningly contrived 
entrance to a spacious bay, the island being 
really a sort of atoll. Here lay the ships of the 
outlawed enemy and the dismantled hulls of 
many of their victims. And it may be believed 
that the brave American tars, under the leader- 
ship of the redoubtable Admiral, played a truly 
heroic part in the destruction of the pirates and 
the succor of such of their victims as survived. 

These are two things worth noting about this 
story: First, the length of time — several 
months — in which the boy lived the greater 
part of his waking hours in the character which 
he had invented; and, second, the verisimilitude 
with which the details relating to the great 



46 WOODROW WILSON 

adventure were set forth in the daily "reports." 
While the climax of the story is, of course, extrav- 
agantly romantic, the boy's written account of 
the details of day's after day's events consists of 
the plainest and most realistic statement of 
commonplace things that would actually have 
happened. In reading this singular manuscript, 
one thinks of Defoe and the art with which that 
master story-teller built up his extraordinary 
effects out of a mass of commonplace circum- 
stances. 

About this time Woodrow was reading 
Cooper's sea tales and Marry at 's yarns, and, 
though he had never seen a ship in his life — 
never even seen the ocean — he knew every 
particular of every class or type of sailing ship, 
the name, place, and use of every spar, sheet, 
and shroud. 

At Columbia, Woodrow — as he began now 
to be commonly called — attended the school 
kept by Mr. Charles Heyward Barnwell. But 
his real education continued to be conducted by 
his father. 

He was now approaching the age for college. 



OFF TO COLLEGE 47 

In spite of his late start at books, he had rapidly 
qualified in the ordinary preparatory studies, 
and at seventeen — in the autumn of 1873 — 
he was sent off to college. 

Davidson College, in famous Mecklenburg 
County, N. C, is a prosperous institution now, 
and forty years ago was a staunch school. The 
fact that the Rev. Dr. Wilson had been ap- 
proached in connection with its presidency may 
have had something to do with its choice for 
Woodrow, but it was believed to be (and with 
reason) an excellent college of stout Presbyterian 
proclivities and thorough teaching. Though 
it stood, then, in the midst of an unkempt field, 
the central building was a fabric of considerable 
nobility, with a rotunda and dome and two side 
wings. A long corridor ran through the length 
of the building — much to the detriment of dis- 
cipline, it is remembered. The central building 
contained a chapel and recitation rooms, while 
the wings were dormitories. 

Living was rather primitive; the boys kept 
their own rooms, filled their own lamps — for 
they had only kerosene — cut up and brought 



48 WOODROW WILSON 

in the wood for their own fires, and carried in 
water from the pump outside. Wilson's room 
was on the ground floor, luckily; it was rather a 
job to carry arm-loads of wood to remote rooms 
on the upper floors. There still lingers at 
Davidson the tradition that Tom W^ilson estab- 
lished a record in the minimum time necessary 
to dress, cross the campus, and be in his seat 
when the before-breakfast chapel bell stopped 
ringing. His room-mate was a young Irishman, 
W^illiam Lecky by name, who was killed shortly 
after leaving college. 

When W^ilson was there, Davidson was a very 
small village, only having the college buildings, 
the home of the faculty, one general store, and 
two small grocery stores, where the boys bought 
their cigars and tobacco, and canned oysters, 
sardines, cheese, and crackers for their nightly 
feasts. Squire Allison, who was also the post- 
master, and John Scofield were the owners of 
these little groceries, and were famous characters 
in the lives of the boys. 

Instruction at Davidson was rather better 
than was common at small colles^es in thosc^ 



OFF TO COLLEGE 49 

days. The University of North CaroHna had 
closed on account of the war, as had some of the 
other leading colleges in the South, and David- 
son reaped the benefit of having such professors 
as Dr. Charles Phillips and Col. William Martin 
from the State University, Blake and Anderson 
from South Carolina, Richardson from Missis- 
sippi, and Latimer from Virginia, all of them 
excellent teachers in their respective lines. Still, 
it can hardly be said that Wilson received much 
intellectual impulse here, although he probably 
added something to his stock of knowledge. His 
college-mates included a score or more who 
afterward made reputations in the world, per- 
haps the most eminent being R. B. Glenn, who 
became Governor of North Carolina. His class- 
mates remember nothing unusual about Wilson 
when at Davidson College. They say he had 
an open, engaging face, pleasant manners, and 
was very generally liked. They agree that he 
was not very much interested in games, which 
then consisted of baseball and "shinny." How- 
ever, he played baseball for a while on the col- 
lege nine and had the pleasure of hearing the 



50 WOODROW WILSON 

captain say: "Wilson, you would make a 
dandy player if you were not so damn lazy." 
He was a great walker and at times seemed to 
like to be alone, walking the country about ap- 
parently wrapped in thought. Still he was, as 
a rule, a very social animal, and a great talker 
in congenial company. When the fellows re- 
paired to his room they would generally find him 
curled up on the bed with a book in his hand, 
reading. He joined one of the literary societies, 
the *'Eumenean." 

Once a year, in February, a holiday was given 
to every student on which he was to plant a 
tree — so, whether Wilson did it to get the holi- 
day, or because he wanted to do something use- 
ful, he planted an elm on the campus at David- 
son, and it stands there strong and upright to-day. 

Early in the year, a small incident in class 
fastened upon him a nickname. The rhetoric 
class being engaged upon that well-known part 
of Trench's ''English, Past and Present" which 
sets forth (much after the manner of the Wamba 
in the opening chapter in "Ivanhoe") how good 
Saxon beasts take Norman names when they 



OFF TO COLLEGE 51 

come to the table, the professor asked Wood- 
row: "What is calves' meat when served at 
table?" and received the hasty reply, "Mut- 
ton!" Wilson was "Monsieur Mouton" for 
the rest of the year. 

Indeed, he did not finish the year, for he 
fell ill just before the examinations came on, 
and was taken to his home, now at Wilmington, 
N. C, to the pastorate of the Presbyterian 
Church, to which city Doctor Wilson had just 
been called. 

Woodrow remained in his father's house at 
Wilmington throughout the year 1874-75. It 
had been determined that he should not return 
to Davidson, but should go to Princeton, and 
he spent the year tutoring in Greek and a few 
other studies which it was thought might be 
necessary for entrance at the Northern uni- 
versity. 

In truth, there was a good deal of play done 
that year, too. The boy had grown too fast, 
and was hardly fit for the rigid schedule of col- 
lege life. So he "took it easy" that year, in a 
city, the first he had ever lived in that possessed 



52 WOODROW WILSON 

any particular local charm. Wilmington was 
an old and historic place. It was a seaport; for 
the first time, W^oodrow saw a ship and caught 
the smell of the sea. Foreign shipping floated 
in the noble river or lay at the docks. Wil- 
mington was a great depot for naval stores; its 
lower streets were redolent of life on the deep. 
Talk was still full of the adventures of the block- 
ade-runners of the war lately ended, W^ilmington 
having been a favorite port of the desperate men 
and swift ships that then made so many gallant 
chapters of sea history. What imaginative 
youth from the interior but would have haunted 
the docks and made an occasional trip down to 
the Cape, to return with the pilot of an outgoing 
ship. 

For the first time, here, too, the young man 
began to take part in the social life which is so 
important an element of existence in the South. 
He was really too young for the associations into 
which he was now thrown, Dr. and Mrs. Wilson 
immediately achieving devoted popularity, the 
parsonage swiftly becoming a social rendezvous 
of the city. It was a city of gentlemen of good 



OFF TO COLLEGE 53 

company and women who would have been 
esteemed briUiant the world over. 

It was a chap very different from the raw 
youth of Davidson who, one day in September, 
1875, took the ''Washington and Weldon" train 
for the North to enter Princeton College. 



CHAPTER IV 

A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 

WHEN Woodrow Wilson got off the train 
at the httle station in Princeton, early 
in September, 1875, one of 134 new- 
comers, he found himself in a charming old 
town of maples, elms, and catalpas, among which 
stood the college buildings, dating, one of them, 
back to 1756. Almost within view of the me- 
tropohs of the hemisphere, Princeton, three 
miles from a railway main line, was, as it 
is still, uniquely sequestered, the noise of the 
city's activities reaching it as a dim echo — as 
the murmur of waves that beat on shores scarcely 
aware of the winds that raised them. 

But it was very far from being the Princeton 
of to-day. It was still the "College of New 
Jersey," commonly known as '* Princeton Col- 
lege." The college buildings numbered only 
sixteen; Witherspoon Hall was just about to be 

54 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 55 

begun. The faculty consisted of twenty-seven 
professors and instructors, seven of them Pres- 
byterian ministers. It can scarcely be said to 
have contained any great teachers, but there 
were in it several men of considerable force of 
personality — the president. Dr. James McCosh; 
Professors Charles A. Young, the astronomer; 
Cyrus Brackett, John T. Duffield, WilHam A. 
Packard, a cultured Latinist; Arnold Guyot, 
the celebrated geologist and geographer. Presi- 
dent McCosh was in his prime, but Professor 
Guyot was on the verge of retirement. Prince- 
ton in 1875 was a good old-fashioned college 
where a man might learn his physics, his logic, 
his moral science, mathematics, "belles lettres," 
astronomy, go on with his Latin and Greek, and 
study the harmony of science and revealed re- 
ligion as well as anywhere. 

The place, full of traditions of the Revolu- 
tionary War, had been a favorite resort of 
Southern students up to 1861. The first war 
had battered the front of Old Nassau Hall, and 
the second had done more substantial, if less 
picturesque, damage in withdrawing from the 



56 WOODROW WILSON 

institution a large part of its Southern patron- 
age — the South could ill afford to send its young 
men far away to college now. This year, in- 
deed, there came twenty men from the Southern 
States. It is remembered that some of these 
youths needed reconstruction; one of them 
needed it badly: Peter J. Hamilton of Alabama 
later developed into a man whose career is a 
credit to his native state as well as to his college, 
but he came up to Princeton a rare ''fire-eater." 
In the campaign year of 1876, the last in which 
''the bloody shirt" was flagrantly waved, 
Hamilton demonstrated his sentiments by going 
out into the street rather than pass underneath 
a national flag suspended over the sidewalk. 
The action got noised about, and Hamilton was 
waited on at night by a committee of students, 
who pulled him out of bed, made him do rev- 
erence to the emblem he had disdained, and, 
after sundry hazing stunts, wrapped him in the 
flag and put him back to bed. 

Wilson is remembered in no such way. He 
was known as a Democrat of stout opinions from 
the day he first opened his mouth on the campus. 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 57 

but no recollection remains of his having dis- 
played any sectional passion. A classmate re- 
members, however, that on one occasion when a 
group of fellows were talking of the misfortunes 
that follow in the wake of war, Wilson, who was 
in the group, cried out, ''You know nothing 
whatever about it!" and with face as white as a 
sheet of paper abruptly left the company. 
Nevertheless, one of his nearest friends of that 
day remarks that it was only years after, as he 
was reading a tribute to General Lee in the 
"History of the American People," that he first 
realized the Southern origin of his old classmate. 
All testimony goes to indicate that "Tom" 
Wilson immediately took his place as a leader in 
the class. He appeared as a young fellow of 
great maturity of character, blended with un- 
usual freshness of interest in all things pertain- 
ing to college life. He had the manners of a 
young aristocrat. His speech was cultured. 
He soon won the reputation of already wide 
reading and sound judgment. There is abun- 
dant evidence that he was, from the start, a 
marked figure among the men who now con- 



58 WOODROW WILSON 

stitute the *' famous class of '79." There have 
been more famous Princeton graduates than 
these, but there has never been a class of so high 
an average of ability. Robert Bridges, one of 
the editors of Scribner's Magazine; the Rev. Dr. 
A. S. Halsey, secretary of the Presbyterian Board 
of Foreign Missions; Charles A. Talcott, M. C; 
Mahlon Pitney, Justice of the Supreme Court of 
the United States; Robert H. McCarter, ex- At- 
torney-General of New Jersey; Edward W. Shel- 
don, president of the United States Trust Com- 
pany; Col. Edwin A. Stevens of New Jersey; 
Judge Robert R. Henderson of Maryland are only 
typical members of a class of unusual mental 
capacity. Among such men, Wilson from the 
start ranked high. 

Not as a student perhaps. He was never a 
bright particular star in examinations. Prince- 
ton graduated as "honor men" such students as 
had maintained throughout their four years' 
course an average of 90 per cent. No less than 
forty-two out of the 122 graduates of '79 were 
"honor men." Wilson barely got in among 
them; he ranked forty-first in the class. 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 59 

The fact is that this son of clergymen and 
editors hadn't come to school to pass through a 
standardized curriculum and fill his head with 
the knowledge prescribed in a college catalogue. 
He had come to prepare himself for a particular 
career — and before he had been at Princeton 
three months he had finally determined on what 
that career should be. 

The class historian, Harold ("Pete") Godwin, 
celebrating the advent in Princeton of the 
members of the class that graduated in '79, de- 
clares that on arrival "Tommy Wilson rushed 
to the library and took out Kant's 'Critique of 
Pure Reason.'" 

To the library Tommy Wilson unquestionably 
did rush. But not to read of pure reason; if 
ever there were a student who demanded facts, 
concrete subjects, applied reason, it was this 
same Wilson, even in his early college days. 

The truth is that, prowling in the alcoves of 
the Chancellor Green Library — new then — 
one day early in the term, the boy stopped at the 
head of the south stairs, where the bound mag- 
azines were kept, and his hand fell upon a file 



60 WOODROW WILSON 

of the Gentleman's Magazine, that ancient and 
respectable repository of EngHsh hterature 
which Dr. Samuel Johnson had helped to start, 
away back in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, with his reports of parliamentary debates. 
When Johnson lay on his death-bed, refusing to 
take "inebriating substance" and having the 
church service read to him daily, he declared 
that his only compunction was those parliamen- 
tary reports. For, of course, they were "fakes" 
ingeniously composed with the aid of William 
Guthrie, a Scotsman, who had a way of getting 
into the House. Nevertheless, the eaves- 
dropper's meagre recollections amplified into 
lengthy speeches full of sonorous generalities 
in the true Johnsonian style (the redactor taking 
mighty good care "that the WTiig dogs should 
get the worst of it") lay at the foundation of 
the prosperity of the Gentleman's Magazine, 

Now it happened that in the '70 's last, the 
editor of the day (himself not an unworthy suc- 
cessor of Edward Cave), feeling round for an 
attractive feature, hit upon the idea of resum- 
ing the parliamentary reports. Accordingly, 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON Gl 

there began in the number for January, 1874, a 
series of articles entitled "Men and Manner in 
Parhament" by ''The Member for the Chiltern 
Hundreds" — the signature being an allusion to 
a parliamentary practice which need not be ex- 
plained to those familiar with English affairs. 
The author was introduced by the editor "with 
particular pride and satisfaction." 

"He is, I think, a not altogether unworthy 
successor, after a long interval, of one who gave 
to the readers of this periodical the at first un- 
privileged and now historical narratives of the 
proceedings of Parliament some hundred and 
thirty years ago." 

Thomas Woodrow Wilson happened to pick 
up this volume of the Gentleman's Magazine and 
to turn to the pages occupied by "Men and 
Manner in Parliament" — and from that mo- 
ment his life-plan was fixed. 

It was an era of brilliant parliamentary his- 
tory. There were giants in those days: John 
Bright, Disraeli, Gladstone, Earl Granville, 
Vernon Harcourt — the personnel of the House 
of Commons had never been more picturesque. 



62 WOODROW WILSON 

the atmosphere more electrical. The "Member 
for the Chiltern Hundreds," in intimate daily 
familiarity with the parliamentary scene and its 
actors, wrote in a style of delicious charm — the 
leisurely style of good-humored banter and 
elegant trifling, his chatter nevertheless afford- 
ing withal a picture of unsurpassable vividness, 
vivacity, and verity. He made to live before the 
eye the figure of Bright, coming into the House 
with his chiseled and polished witticisms in his 
pocket, ready for setting in the framework of a 
speech; of Gladstone, a marvel of verbal resource- 
fulness, bewildering when (^s usual) he w^ished 
to bewilder, clarifying and convincing when the 
time for clear statement had come; of Disraeli, 
with his poisoned sentences spoken to the ac- 
companiment of bodily jerks (supposed to be 
gestures) "graceful as the waddling of a duck 
across a stubble field." He drew unforgettable 
pictures of Mr. Lowe, Sir James Elphinston, 
"the bo'sun," Mr. Scoonfield, with his anecdotes 
— of scores of others, their voices, attitudes, 
their very collars. Safe behind his anonymity, 
there was no personality, no measure, no method 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 63 

upon which ''the Member for the Chiltern 
Hundreds" hesitated to turn his keen and dis- 
cerning eye. 

It will be news to Mr. Wilson that the Gentle- 
man's Magazine contributor was Henry W. Lucy, 
who later created for Punch the character of 
"Toby, M. P.," and was knighted by King 
Edward. It should be said, however, that this 
inimitable parliamentary reporter has never 
since quite equaled his early performance as the 
anonymous successor of Doctor Johnson. 

Nothing could have better served to awaken 
in a young reader a sense of the picturesqueness 
and dramatic interest of politics, and Mr. Wilson 
has said to the writer of this biography that no 
one circumstance did more to make public life 
the purpose of his existence, nor more to deter- 
mine the first cast of his political ideas. The 
young man turned back to the first volume of 
the Gentleman's Magazine, Then, going to 
other sources, he took up in earnest the study of 
English political history. He became saturated 
with the spirit of the life and practices of the 
British Parliament; the excitements of political 



64 WOODROW WILSON 

life enchanted him; the methods of high debate 
impressed themselves upon him, and, of course, 
the history of England for many years past 
became as famihar to him as that of his own 
country. 

The Lucy articles could not fail to reveal that 
the business of the British Empire was done in 
public by men who, through their talents, had 
risen to leadership which they had to maintain 
in daily tournaments before the whole world. 
Wilson was almost immediately led to contrast 
the British system of government with that of 
America, his conclusion being that the dramatic 
and swiftly responsive English system was in- 
finitely the better. 

This subject — the methods of democratic 
government — the comparative merits of open 
parliamentary and private committee govern- 
ment — became a theme around which Wilson's 
mind continued to revolve for many years, as 
we shall see. 

The characteristic thing about Wilson's under- 
graduate days at Princeton was that his work 
was done in practical independence of the ordi- 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 65 

nary college routine of instruction — at which 
even in those days he was sometimes heard to 
rail. His mind had now settled definitely upon 
a public career — the impulse he had received 
from the Gentleman's Magazine had been deci- 
sive. His purpose in Princeton was henceforth 
the clear and single one of preparing himself for 
public life. Always he was reading, thinking, 
and writing about government. He was in no 
sense a "dig," and seemed to have no particular 
ambition in the college studies, but he devoted 
every energy to the furnishing and the training 
of his mind as an authority on government, the 
history of government, and leadership in public 
life. He began to practise the elective system 
ten years before Princeton did. He had an eye 
keen for what he needed, and to its pursuit he 
gave all his energies. There was nothing casual 
nor accidental in his work. His study was bent 
on government, the history of various attempts 
in it, and the theory of it, and the lives of polit- 
ical leaders. To this he added assiduous prac- 
tice in writing and extemporaneous speaking; 
the seeking for skill in expression and readiness 



66 WOODROW WILSON 

in debate. He followed this course from the 
very start and kept it up until the day he grad- 
uated. His most intimate classmate, Robert 
Bridges, says of him that his college career was 
remarkable for the "confident selection" of his 
work, and his "easy indifference" to all subjects 
not directly in hne with his purpose. His busi- 
ness in college apparently was to train his mind 
to do what he wanted it to do — and what he 
wanted it to do he knew. He had already made 
himself proficient in stenography, finding it of 
great value in making digests of what he read 
and quotations which would otherwise have 
occupied him long. 

Princeton was not then remarkable in the 
teaching of English; the head of the English 
Department, Professor Murray, was himself a 
clear writer and speaker, yet without special 
grace of style. But the men trained themselves, 
in literary societies. The body of the students 
was divided into two "Halls," so-called secret 
societies, but really debating clubs — the Ameri- 
can Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society. 
Wilson belonged to Whig Hall, an organization 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 67 

whose constitution had been written by James 
Madison. 

Here the young man was in his glory. He 
entered eagerly into its traditions and became 
almost immediately one of its leading spirits. 
To reading and writing day and night upon his 
favorite themes he began to add practice in 
elocution. One of his classmates troubled with 
a weak throat, who was sent down to Potter's 
woods to practise exercises, often saw Wilson 
in another part of the woods declaiming from a 
volume of Burke. On vacations he was known 
to spend a good deal of time reading aloud and 
declaiming in his father's church at Wilmington. 
Another debating society organized by Wilson 
himself, called the Liberal Debating Club, was 
fashioned after the British Parliament, a group 
of the members representing the government, 
and being obliged to maintain the confidence of 
the chamber or go out of power. 

Wilson does not appear as a great prize- 
winner. His record does not compare with that 
of Elsing, Bridges, or Halsey. Elsing was the 
first freshman speaker, the first sophomore 



68 WOODROW WILSON 

orator, the first junior orator and winner of the 
junior debate. However, Wilson did score as 
second sophomore orator in the WTiig Hall 
contest and was one of the literary men of the 
class, an oration on Cobden and an essay on 
Lord Chatham (the elder Pitt) being especially 
recorded. Chatham, Burke, Brougham, and 
Bagehot were his great favorites — Burke first 
of all. From Brougham it may be conjectured 
he acquired his taste for a finished peroration — 
though the fancy never led him into the extrav- 
agances of the Irish orator, who one day ended 
a speech with an ecstatic prayer, for which he 
fell on his knees — a posture from which his 
friends dragged him in an unseemly struggle, 
attributing his collapse to over-indulgence in 
the port with which he was accustomed to prime 
himself. Macaulay held the student's attention 
for a while, but he soon became critical of the 
historian's overloaded style. 

Connected with the two big prizes of the 
college are two stories which throw light upon 
Wilson's character as a student. The English 
Literary Prize of $125 his classmates thought 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 69 

that Wilson might easily win; but when he 
learned that to compete meant to spend time 
studying Ben Jonson and two plays of Shakes- 
peare, he refused to go into it, saying he had no 
time to spare from the reading that interested 
him. 

The other big prize, that of the Lynde Debate, 
had been founded the year of Wilson's entrance 
to college, and he had undoubtedly looked for- 
ward to winning it, throughout his course. The 
Lynde was an extemporaneous discussion par- 
ticipated in by three representatives from each 
of the two Halls. The Halls' representatives 
were thus chosen: a subject was proposed by a 
committee and candidates were required to argue 
on either side as was determined by lot. By 
universal consent Wilson was now the star de- 
bater of the Whig Society. He was quite in a 
class by himself, and there was no doubt in any- 
body's mind that he would represent the Hall 
and win the prize. The subject for the pre- 
liminary debate in Whig Hall was "Free-Trade 
versus Protection." Wilson put his hand into 
the hat and drew out a slip which required him 



70 WOODROW WILSON 

to argue in favor of "Protection." He tore up 
the slip and refused to debate. He was a con- 
vinced and passionate free-trader, and nothing 
under heaven, he swore, would induce him to 
advance arguments in which he did not believe. 
"Bob" Bridges became Whig Hall's representa- 
tive — and lost to "Wood" Halsey, Clio's man 
— who attributes his success to the fact that an 
opponent who would have vanquished him was 
oversensitive. 

It will not be supposed that life was all work 
even for this rather serious-minded youth. 

Princeton was famous for the pranks of its 
students. On one occasion, they had taken a 
donkey to the cupola of Nassau Hall. Every 
class considered itself disgraced unless it had 
made way with the clapper of the college bell. 
There was a cane-rush between freshmen and 
sophomores. The '78 class wore the mortar- 
board; the '79's did not. Wilson ridiculed 
'78's head-gear. 

Wilson lived first at the house of Mrs. Wright. 
One of his classmates, "Bob" McCarter, who 
also lived at Mrs. W^right's, tells of a certain 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 71 

evening when the two were engaged in Wilson's 
study in a quiet game of euchre, a forbidden 
pastime in those days. On the table, as it hap- 
pened, lay a Bible. A knock was heard at the 
door; McCarter swiftly swept the cards out of 
sight under the table and went to the door. 
Before he opened it, he turned his head for a 
moment, the thought flashing over him that the 
conscientious Wilson might have put the cards 
back in plain view on the table, but what he 
saw was — Wilson reading the Bible. 

It was the time of the great popularity of 
"Pinafore " and the strains of '' My Little Butter- 
cup," and "What! Never?" were all the go. 
Doctor Greene of the Princeton Seminary pos- 
sessed a deep, solemn voice. One day in 
chapel he gave out unctuously the hymn con- 
taining the well-known stanza: 

That soul though all hell should endeavor to shake 
I'll never, no never, no never forsake! 

But the effect was somewhat spoiled by an ir- 
reverent voice in the rear of the chapel : " What ! 
never .f^" 



72 WOODROW WILSON 

Fraternities were not permitted at Princeton, 
but the college had plenty of organizations of 
every possible variety and description — *' Cy- 
clops," "The Potato Bugs," "The Princeton Gas 
Company." Wilson belonged to none besides 
the "Whig," his little debating circle, and an 
eating club, whose members called themselves 
"The Alligators." 

When Witherspoon Hall was finished, Wilson 
moved into it. His room was 7, west. At this 
time it is recorded that he weighed 156 pounds 
and stood five feet eleven. 

While without particular inclination or ability 
in athletics — and while back in '75-'79 athletics 
did not play the part in college life that it now 
plays — W^oodrow Wilson was a leader in the 
encouragement of sports, and in '78-'79 was 
president of the Athletic Committee, at another 
time of the Baseball Association. 

His classmates and schoolmates concur in 
describing the college lad as a fellow of dignity, 
yet perfectly democratic. The picture is that 
of a youth of unusual mental and moral maturity 
- — a well-poised fellow, never a roisterer, yet 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 73 

always full of life and interested in everything 
that was going on. He was popular — of that 
there can be no doubt. The young man had a 
certain charm of manner and sweetness of soul 
that forbade anybody's disliking him, although 
he was generally felt to be "a little above the 
crowd." He never belonged to a clique. He 
was a normal college boy, not a prig nor a "dig" 
nor a *' grind," but a healthy, hearty, all-around 
chap, interested in everything that was going 
on, mingling with everybody — though cherish- 
ing some particular friendships that have en- 
dured. 

The years passed. Recitations were attended, 
examinations duly passed. The library yielded 
up its secrets to the mind ; life in the little com- 
monwealth of young men matured the char- 
acter; intercourse with kindred spirits awakened 
generous enthusiasms. In '77 Tom Wilson went 
on the board of editors of the Princetonian, 
the college newspaper, then a bi-weekly. In 
'78 he became its managing editor. Under his 
management it continued about as before — not 
overwhelmingly interesting to the outsider, 



74 WOODROW WILSON 

though here and there is discernible a little 
brightness scarcely to be found in earlier issues. 
Occasionally we discover a satirical note like 
this: 

A literary meeting was held at Doctor McCosh's res- 
idence on the evening of the 13th. Mr. David Stewart 
read a paper on Ethics. The discussion was interesting. 

A department headed "Here and There" was 
the Princetonian's best feature. Once in a while 
its writer broke into rhyme — not always so 
tragically sad as this: 

"I will work out a rhyme 
If I only have time," 

Said the man of *'Here and There," 
So he tried for a while: 
Result — a loose pile 

Of his beautiful golden hair. 

During his senior year Wilson threw into the 
form of a closely reasoned essay the chief results 
of his thinking on the subject of the American 
contrasted with the British system of govern- 
ment. This article he sent to what was regarded 
as the most serious magazine then published in 



A STUDENT AT PRINCETON 75 

America, and it was immediately accepted for 
publication. The author was twenty-two years 
old and an undergraduate. 

In the files of the International Review, issue 
of August, 1879, may be found an article en- 
titled "Cabinet Government in the United 
States," signed by Thomas W. Wilson. It was 
an impeachment of government by " a legislature 
which is practically irresponsible," and a plea 
for a reformed method under which Congress 
should be again made responsible and swiftly 
responsive in some such way as is the British 
Parliament. The author's quarrel is with the 
practice of doing all the important work of 
Congress in secret committees. Secrecy, he 
says, is the atmosphere in which all corruption 
and evil flourishes. "Congress should legislate 
as if in the presence of the whole country, in 
open and free debate." (These words were 
written thirty-two years ago.) He attributes 
the growth of the committee system to the lack 
of leaders in Congress, and his plan for the 
creation of leaders is that of giving Cabinet 
ministers a seat in Congress. He quotes Justice 



76 WOODROW WILSON 

Story to the effect that the heads of departments, 
even if they were not allowed to vote, might 
without danger be admitted to participate in 
Congressional debates. Wilson argues with much 
ingenuity that the method he urges is the ideal 
one for the insuring of a strong Congress and a 
strong Cabinet, for securing the attention of the 
country (the possibilities of Congressional debate 
and the fall of the Cabinet being dramatic), and 
for the insurance of the greatest possible amount 
of publicity. 

W'ith this achievement of breaking into a 
high-class magazine, Woodrow Wilson closed 
his undergraduate days at Princeton. During 
his senior year he had concluded that the best 
path to a public career lay through the law. In 
the autumn, therefore, he matriculated in the 
law department of the University of Virginia, 
that seat of liberal learning organized by Thomas 
Jefferson. 



CHAPTER V 

STILL STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 

WAR and Reconstruction had reduced the 
number of students at Charlottesville 
to 328 in the session of 1879-80, but 
War and Reconstruction had not lowered Vir- 
ginia's lofty standard either of scholarship or of 
honor. Wilson's life here was in many respects 
a repetition of that at Princeton. Here, too, he 
immediately took his place as a leader. The 
law school men were in close fellowship with 
the undergraduates of "Virginia." Study was 
rather more necessary than at Princeton in those 
days; a man had to work to pass his examina- 
tions — these, by the way, were conducted on 
the '* honor plan." Still, there was a gay set 
as well as a steady set, and Wilson had friends 
among both sets. 

Sports were engaged in to the extent of an 
occasional baseball game among the students 

77 



78 WOODROW WILSON 

or with a nine from a neighboring town, a foot- 
race or two in the autumn, and some boat-racing 
on the Httle Rivanna River in the spring. There 
was also a gymnasium, and prizes were given the 
proficient; intercollegiate contests were un- 
known. Wilson played a little baseball and took 
long walks through the pleasant country lying 
about, often alone, though sometimes with a 
favorite companion. At Princeton Greek-letter 
fraternities were illegal, but they existed with the 
approval of the faculty at the University of 
Virginia, and on October 25, 1879, W^ilson was 
initiated into the Phi Kappa Psi. 

He joined the chapel choir and the glee club. 
The latter circle of harmonious spirits, directed 
by Duncan Emmett, now and for some years 
past a practising physician of New York City, 
made serenading excursions in the country 
'round about, two or three times a week, wind- 
ing up its pleasure-imparting career with a 
Grand Concert in the Town Hall. W^ilson many 
a night stumbled along the rocky roads with his 
fellow glee-men to arrive at last under the 
balcony of some damsel and lift his fine tenor 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 79 

voice in "She sleeps, my lady sleeps," and 
"Speed away!" At the Grand Concert, which 
was given on the evening of the Final Ball, a 
brilliant audience that crowded the hall beheld 
the prize-orator and prize-writer step down to 
the footlights and render a touching tenor solo. 
Wilson is best remembered as a singer, however, 
by the thrilling eflfect with which he usually 
achieved the high note near the end of "The 
Star Spangled Banner." 

Wilson did a good deal of writing while at 
Charlottesville. From the road in front of 
"Dawson's Row" passersby would see him 
sitting at the window in the southeast corner of 
"House F," darkly engaged with an ink-bottle, 
out of which he had conjured, before a year was 
up, the W^riter's Prize. 

In March, 1880, the University Magazine 
printed an article by him on John Bright; in the 
following month another on Gladstone. The 
young man's mind still ran, as it had run at 
Princeton, on the personality of the great po- 
litical leaders. 

The John Bright article was really a version 



80 WOODROW WILSON 

of an oration which Wilson was deUvering that 
month. So great had his reputation grown in 
six months that there was a considerable demand 
from outside the university for admission, and 
the occasion was thrown open to the public. 

At Charlottesville, as at Princeton, the stu- 
dent-body was divided into two literary and 
debating societies: the Washingtonian and the 
JeflFersonian — in the common tongue, "Wash" 
and "Jeff." The fortunes of each alternately 
w^axed and waned; "Jeff" was the stronger in 
1879, and Wilson joined it. His talents at once 
won recognition, but he found a competitor to 
respect in another "Jeff" man, William Cabell 
Bruce, of Charlotte County, Va., a young orator 
of extraordinary ability. He was later presi- 
dent of the Maryland Senate, and is now presi- 
dent of the Woodrow Wilson Association of 
Maryland. 

The chief annual event at Charlottesville was 
a debating contest in the Jeffersonian Society, 
at which two gold medals were awarded, one for 
debating, the other for oratorical ability. The 
subject was: "Is the Roman Catholic in the 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 81 

United States a menace to American institu- 
tions?" In the contest, April 1880, in which 
Bruce and Wilson (he taking the negative) par- 
ticipated, Bruce was given the debater's medal, 
while the orator's prize went to Wilson. The 
opinion of pretty nearly everybody, aside from 
the judges, was that the award should have 
been reversed. Bruce was ornate in style; 
Wilson simple, direct and logical. 

In a wholly different vein from his speeches 
in the ''Jeff" Society was one notable effort in 
which the university's favorite appeared when he 
delivered medals to the winners in athletic 
games. Having agreed to make this presenta- 
tion, Wilson was very much exercised as to what 
to say and imparted his perplexity to an inti- 
mate friend, Richard H. Dabney (now dean of 
Graduate Studies in the university). W^here- 
upon Dabney, who was in a merry mood, rattled 
off two pieces of nonsense which he suggested 
would about suit the taste of the audience in the 
gymnasium. Neither piece contained the slight- 
est allusion to athletic sports. Yet somehow the 
orator worked them in, proclaiming the vie- 



82 WOODROW WILSON 

tory of the athletes in flesh-colored tights who 
stood lined before him in the verses: 

'Twas in the gloaming, by the fair Wyoming, 
That I left my darling, many years ago; " 

And memory tender brings her back in splendor 
With her cheeks of roses and her brow of snow. 

But where in thunder is she now, I wonder? 

Oh, my soul, be quiet, and, my sad heart, hush! 
Under the umbrella of another fellow 

Ah ! I think I see her, paddling through the slush ! 

A little farther along in the oration the cheer- 
ing throng listened to the solemn recital of this 
moving sentiment: 

I stood upon the ocean's briny shore and with a fragile 
reed I wrote upon the sand, ''Agnes, I love thee!^^ But 
the mad waves rolled by, and blotted out the fair impres- 
sion. Cruel waves! Treacherous sands! I'll trust you 
no more. But, with a giant's hand, I'll pluck from Nor- 
way's frozen shore her tallest pine — and dip its top into 
the crater of Vesuvius — and upon the high and burnished 
heavens I'll write, ''Agnes, I love thee!** and I'd like to see 
any doggoned wave wash that out! 

Dabney was a good deal of a wag. Among 
the idiotic songs which for some inscrutable 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 83 

reason periodically sweep over the country one 
of the silhest was the favorite in 1880. Every- 
body will recall it: 

Whoa, Emma! Whoa, Emma! 
You put me in such a dilemma — 

although few will recall the nature of the 
dilemma from which the victim clamored for 
relief. On one occasion Wilson was quoting 
the lines in which Hamlet, after speaking of the 
*' customary suits of solemn black," worn by 
mourners, exclaims: 

"But I have that within me which passeth show; 
These, but the trappings — the suits of woe." 

No sooner had he uttered the final "woe" 
than Dabney took it out of his mouth and com- 
pleted it with an uproarious "Emma." No 
Shakespeare was quoted between the two friends 
for many months. 

The gymnasium speech represents one of the 
few occasions in which the young student bent 
very far from his dignity in public, but in private 
he fairly bubbled with humor and wit, and was 



84 WOODROW WILSON 

very much given to monkey shines. The room 
in "Dawson's Row," and that in ''West Range" 
which he later occupied, were the scenes not only 
of a great deal of hard reading, elevated thought, 
and serious conversation, but also of a great 
many elaborate jokes and abandoned capers. 

As he had done at Princeton, Wilson at Char- 
lottesville also organized a smaller group of 
thinking chaps for debate. A member of that 
group remembers Wilson's unspeakable disgust 
when they chose as the subject for one night's 
discussion the question whether there be any 
fundamental difference between right and wrong. 
Wilson was secretary of the *'Jeff " Society dur- 
ing part of his time in Charlottesville, and the 
records kept by him in that capacity were a 
model of neatness and accuracy. 

The law professors of the University of Vir- 
ginia were Mr. Southall, who held the chaii of 
international and common law, an easy-going 
and much-beloved man, and Dr. John B. Minor, 
who taught everything else in the course, and 
was in fact, the college of law. 

Doctor Minor probably influenced W^ilson 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 85 

more than did any other teacher he ever had. 
He was indeed an able and forceful man, a really 
great teacher, who grounded his pupils, beyond 
all possibility of ever getting adrift, in the broad 
principles of law. He employed in class a text- 
book which he had himself written, or, rather, 
revised, for it was frankly based on Blackstone 
as that legal philosopher's teaching had applica- 
tion in the United States and especially in the 
state of Virginia. Doctor Minor was a man of 
impressive presence and jSne face, with an aris- 
tocratic nose, at the extreme tip of which he 
wore pince-nez, through which he glanced at 
his roll-sheet. He used the Socratic method, 
with more than Socratic sternness. He cate- 
chised and he grilled, but with such effective- 
ness that, though the victim writhed — the 
class meanwhile mentally groaning in sympathy 
— he learned never to forget the point to which 
the professor led him. Wilson's seat was in 
the front row at the Professor's left hand. So 
popular, despite his severity, were Doctor 
Minor's courses, that it was a saying at 
Charlottesville that, if Minor were to an- 



86 WOODROW WILSON 

nounce an "exam" at midnight, a man had 
better be on hand at eleven o'clock to be sure 
of a seat. 

As a young man, Wilson suffered much from 
indigestion — an ill which later he entirely 
outgrew. Just before Christmas, 1880, he found 
himself so unwell that he left Charlottesville. 
The next year he spent at home in Wilmington, 
N. C, nursing his health and reading. 

In May, 1882, Woodrow W^ilson went to 
Atlanta, to enter on the practice of law. At- 
lanta was chosen for this experiment simply 
because it was the most rapidly growing city of 
the South. The young man knew nobody 
there. He went to live at the boarding-house 
of Mrs. Boylston, born Drayton, and a member 
of that old South Carolina family, on Peachtree 
Street. Here he met another young man, like 
himself a stranger in the city, whither he too had 
come to practise law — Edward Ireland Renick. 
The two agreed on a partnership; on mutual 
inquiry, Renick proved to be slightly the older, 
so that the shingle w^as lettered "Renick & 
Wilson." It was hung out of the window of a 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 87 

room on the second floor, facing the side street, 
of the building 48 Marietta Street. 

Atlanta litigants did not rush en masse to 
48 Marietta Street. In fact, they never came. 
The brilhant legal victories for which, no doubt, 
Messrs. Renick and Wilson were competent 
were never won. Atlanta seemed to prefer 
lawyers whom it had known. 

Wilson's sole idea had been to use the law as 
a stepping-stone to a political career; most of 
the pubhc men of the South had come from the 
ranks of the law. In eighteen months in At- 
lanta he learned that it was impossible for a 
man without private means to support himself 
long enough in law to get into public life; im- 
possible, certainly, to establish a practice with- 
out giving up all idea of study and writing not 
strictly connected with the profession. The 
law was a jealous mistress. He had begun writ- 
ing a book on Congressional Government, and 
he found the work of its composition full of joy. 
With joy he found he could not contemplate 
years of effort to further the interests of clients 
under the capricious and illogical statutes of 



88 WOODROW WILSON 

Georgia, interpreted by a Supreme Court whom 
he could not then look up to as masters in the 
law. 

But the Atlanta experiment was not without 
its great good fortune : 

During the summer of 1883 Mr. Wilson found 
time to make what turned out to be a momen- 
tous visit. His old playmate and cousin, Jessie 
W^oodrow Bones, with whom he had played 
Indian on the Sand Hills near Augusta, was now 
living in Rome, Ga. Mr. Bones had started a 
branch of his business at Rome, and, finding the 
Georgia town the prettier and more agreeable 
place, had moved his family there. To Rome 
had come also another family with whom the 
Wilsons had been intimate in Augusta — the 
Axsons. The Axsons were a Georgia lowlands 
family; the Rev. S. Edward Axson's father was 
a distinguished clergyman in Savannah, and his 
wife's father, the Rev. Nathan Hoyt, was long 
pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Athens, Ga. 

The calls upon his time not being entirely oc- 
cupying, as has been hinted, young W^ilson went 
to Rome to see his cousin — and stayed to see 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 89 

more of Miss Ellen Louise Axson. The meeting 
was on the piazza of the Bones home in East 
Rome. To be accurate, it was not quite the 
couple's first meeting: he had been a passionate 
admirer of the lady when he was a boy of seven, 
and she was a baby. The sentiment of those 
days, beyond the recollection of either, revived. 
He took her home that evening — she lived in 
Rome across the river. She must have been 
captivating, for, as he came back across the 
bridge, he clenched his hand and took a silent 
oath that Ellen Louise Axson should one day be 
his wife. 

Which also in due time came to pass. 

They had seen each other eleven times before 
he had persuaded her to say "Yes." There was 
no idea of an immediate marriage. Already, 
perceiving that the practice of law was not the 
path for him, he had settled upon the plan of 
going to Johns Hopkins University to spend two 
or three years more studying the science of 
government. 

The partnership of Renick & Wilson was dis- 
solved. The young man to whom the people 



90 WOODROW WILSON 

of Atlanta gave so little encouragement, but who 
had won what made him inestimably happier 
than anything else Georgia could have given 
him, went north in September. About the same 
time Miss Axson too went to New York to 
develop her already recognized talents in paint- 
ing, as a member of the Art Students' League. 

The next two years of Woodrow Wilson's life 
were spent at Johns Hopkins University as a 
student of history and political economy. The 
professors who mainly directed his studies were 
the late Herbert B. Adams, historian, and 
Richard T. Ely (now of the University of Wis- 
consin), economist. The chief social life of the 
university (which is a place of graduate study 
chiefly and is without dormitories or ''college 
life") was in the weekly seminars, in which per- 
haps thirty men gathered to read and discuss 
papers under the direction of a professor. 

Here Wilson was one of an unusually inter- 
esting group, which included Albert Shaw and 
E. R. L. Gould, John Franklin Jameson, the 
historian; Arthur Yager, now president of 
Georgetown College, Kentucky, and Thomas 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 91 

Dixon, who writes novels. (Dixon was not long 
at Johns Hopkins.) Professor Ely was just back 
from Europe, where he had been studying social- 
ism and had fallen under the influence of certain 
German ''socialists of the chair." He gave a 
course on the history of French and German 
socialism. 

The advantages enjoyed at Johns Hopkins 
by Wilson lay, however, not so much in the hear- 
ing of lectures as in the opportunity of making 
researches under, and working with, Ely and 
Adams and his fellow-students. Here he got a 
valuable impulse in the direction of the careful 
and exact ascertaining of facts. Though always 
priding himself on dealing with actualities, W^il- 
son was never a grubber after facts — and in- 
deed never became one, as Jameson, for instance, 
did. But he undoubtedly did get here a train- 
ing that balanced the natural tendency of his 
mind to work from within outward, and saved 
him from the consequences which might have 
followed the ease of expression he had attained. 

He remained two years, the second year as 
holder of the Historical Fellowship. The time 



92 WOODROW WILSON 

was brightened by occasional visits to New 
York, and his fiancee, and to Philadelphia, 
where lived an uncle of hers whom she some- 
times visited. 

There was no glee club at Johns Hopkins, but 
Wilson set straightaway about organizing one, 
with the cooperation of Charles Levermore (now 
president of Adelphi College). Levermore's 
singing voice was as low as Wilson's was high. 
Prof. Charles S. Morris, of the department of 
Latin and Greek, one of the most kindhearted 
of men, consented to act as president of the 
club, and invited them to meet at his house 
once a month for an evening of social enjoyment. 
Every member of the glee club — to which be- 
longed not only Shaw, Gould, and Yager, but 
Davis R. Dewey, Edward T. Ingle, David T. 
Day, B. J. Ramage, Charles Warren, and other 
men who have made themselves eminent — re- 
members the charming hospitality of the Mor- 
rises and the good fellowship and gay spirits of 
the remarkable group of students whom they 
entertained, or were entertained by. When it 
was proposed to give a concert at Hopkins Hall 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 03 

and charge for admission in order to pay some 
expense of the organization, the grave gentle- 
men who at the time presided over the destinies 
of the university demurred. President Gihnan 
offered to donate the necessary money provided 
the club would give its concert without admis- 
sion fee. In the slight controversy that followed 
Wilson appeared as an insurgent, protesting that 
the glee club had its dignity to consider as well 
as had the university. The concert was given 
as originally planned, and no one felt that the 
dignity of the university suffered in the least 
from the performance. The picture of this 
group of young men still hangs in a conspicuous 
place in the rooms of the Historical Seminary, 
where its organization originated, and to which 
many of its members in later years returned to 
lecture. 

One piece of writing that Wilson did at this 
period, a study of Adam Smith (not yet, you see, 
had he wearied of studying political personal- 
ities), was recognized by all as exceptional 
in felicity and power of expression. It was 
given magazine publication and later gave 



94 WOODROW WILSON 

the title to a volume of essays — ''An Old 
Master." 

Early in 1885 was completed and published — 
the result of the suggestion made by the perusal 
of the Gentleman's Magazine articles ten years 
before, and of constant thought and study ever 
since — a book, '' Congressional Government. 
A Study of Government by Committee, by 
Woodrow Wilson." It was the first account of 
the actual working of the Constitution of the 
United States ; an inspection of our Government, 
not as it is theoretically constituted, but as it 
actually works. 

The book met with instant success. A serious 
work seldom makes a sensation, and that word 
would be too strong to apply to the impression 
produced by ''Congressional Government," but 
it is quite true that it received an enthusiastic 
reception at the hands of all interested in pubHc 
matters. Of its merits it is enough to say that 
Mr. James Bryce, in the preface to "The Ameri- 
can Commonwealth," acknowledged his obliga- 
tion to Woodrow Wilson. 

It was a great moment in the life of the young 



STUDYING LAW AND POLITICS 95 

man — indeed a great moment for two young 
persons. Success like this meant that hfe was 
at last to begin. On the heels of the fame won 
by "Congressional Government" came invita- 
tions to several college chairs. There was more 
work still to be done for a Ph.D. But the Johns 
Hopkins faculty was to accept the book as a 
doctor's thesis, and the author accepted one of 
the calls — that from Bryn Mawr, which wanted 
him to come as associate in history and political 
economy. 

Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Louise Axson were 
married at her grandfather's house in Savannah, 
on June 24, 1885. In the autumn they came to 
the pretty W^elsh-named village on the "Main 
Line" near Philadelphia, and a new chapter of 
life began. 



(( 



CHAPTER VI 



PROFESSOR WILSON 



A SCHOOL teacher's existence is not, in 
the narration, a thrilhng story. The 
first seventeen years of Woodrow Wil- 
son's Hfe after he left Johns Hopkins University 
were spent in teaching. They were years of 
usefulness — thousands of students will testify 
to the still enduring inspiration they owe to 
them and to him. They were years of delight- 
ful living, of cultured and genial companionship. 
For leisurely reading, doubtless, there could be 
set down here a volume of interesting anecdote 
and scholarly banter and epigram, of pleasant 
fireside reminiscences of savants and big-wigs, 
of literary gossip, and humors of the lecture- 
room, with perhaps a bit or two of college 
scandal. No doubt there could be contrived a 
narrative, fascinating to patient psychologists, 
of the mental evolution that went on during 



"PROFESSOR" WILSON 97 

these years. For the purpose of this biography, 
however, the point is that they led up to one of 
the most dramatic and significant of recent 
battles for the cause of democracy and freedom 
and prepared a man for leadership in a bigger 
struggle, the battle-ground of which is the soil 
of the American Republic. 
Briefly, then, of these college years: 
It was with the unrelinquished purpose of 
having his part in the public life of the nation 
that Woodrow Wilson entered upon the profes- 
sion of a teacher of law and politics. It can 
hardly be said, however, that his first position 
was one which gave promise of any large imme- 
diate influence on public affairs. A number of 
Johns Hopkins men, on the opening in 1885 of 
Bryn Mawr College, accepted as their first 
professorships places in the faculty of the new 
institution for women; the vulgar even referred 
to Bryn Mawr as ''Johanna Hopkins." Some 
were so irreverent as to suggest that the young 
professors were ''merely trying it on the dog." 
Professor Wilson, though called to Bryn Mawr 
primarily to give instruction in politics and 



98 WOODROW WILSON 

political economy, taught a good deal besides 
those subjects; classical history, and the history 
of the Renaissance fell to him. Perhaps the 
young ladies profited as much by his teaching of 
these latter subjects as they did by expositions 
of political science which could not have come 
very close home to many of them. His lectures 
are said on high authority to have been "mar- 
vels" of scholarship, profoundly impressing his 
classes. Yet there are not lacking bits of 
evidence which seem to betray a certain failure 
to take the idea of instructing young ladies in 
politics quite as seriously as some of the other 
faculty members took their tasks. The higher 
education of women was not then a thing ac- 
cepted; 'twas rather an idea to be vindicated, 
and the people who had organized and who ad- 
ministered Bryn Mawr were in the mood to do 
a good job of vindication. 

Professor Wilson worked very hard to make 
his lectures interesting; one of the faculty who 
lived next door testifies that the light in his study 
window was invariably burning long after every- 
body else had gone to bed. From the start-ofif 



"PROFESSOR" WILSON 99 

of his professional career Mr. Wilson appears to 
have reaHzed the necessity of imparting vivacity 
and reahty to his lectures; there is some ground 
to suspect that the intense young ladies who sat 
under him did not always appreciate the lighter 
side of his discourses. At all events, it is re- 
membered that he appeared one day in the 
lecture-room without the long mustache which 
had up to then adorned his countenance — a 
sacrifice which, it was hinted, he had made in the 
hope of being hereafter better able to suggest to 
his classes certain delicacies of thought and 
fancy which they had shown little sign of appre- 
hending. 

Bryn Mawr College at the beginning con- 
sisted of Taylor Hall, and one dormitory — 
Merion. It opened with forty-three students. 
Three houses at the edge of the campus were 
occupied by the dean and professors, many of 
the latter being bachelors. Later Mr. Wilson 
leased a pretty cottage, the parsonage of the 
little Baptist Church on the old Gulf Road, in 
the midst of a lovely countryside. In this, their 
first home, the Wilsons took great pride and 



100 WOODROW WILSON 

satisfaction. In vacation time they went back 
South among old friends. It was in the South 
that the first two children were born. 

In June, 1886, Professor Wilson took his Ph.D. 
at Johns Hopkins, the university accepting as 
his thesis his book " Congressional Government." 
During his third year at Bryn Mawr, Professor 
Wilson accepted a lectureship at Johns Hopkins ; 
this took him to Baltimore once a week for 
twenty-five weeks. 

Connection between the school where Mr. 
Wilson had last been a student and the one in 
which he was first a teacher was, as has been 
said, close. Francis E. King and John Carey 
Thomas, of the Board of Trustees of Johns 
Hopkins, had been instrumental in drawing up 
the courses of study on the ''group system," 
in which much pride was justly felt at the 
new college. Its dean was Doctor Thomas's 
daughter, Miss M. Carey Thomas, who con- 
tinues to-day, since President Rhodes's death, 
under the title of president, to administer the 
institution. Among the Hopkins men in the 
faculty were E. B. W^ilson, a celebrated biologist. 



"PROFESSOR" WILSON 101 

now at Columbia University; Prof. F. S. Lee, 
now also of the Columbia faculty; Prof. Paul 
Shorey, now of Chicago University, who rep- 
resented the literary side of classical study, and 
E. W. Hopkins, now of Yale, a man of contrast- 
ing spirit and interest, who taught the classics 
as a philologist. 

Social life at Bryn Mawr was most agreeable. 
An invitation to an older and larger institution 
was nevertheless not to be declined; ampler op- 
portunity opened in a school attended by young 
men, and in 1888 Professor Wilson accepted an 
election to the chair of history and political econ- 
omy at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 

Wesleyan University was an established insti- 
tution with its course of study, its faculty, and 
its traditions long settled. In the faculty Mr. 
Wilson found a number of men of marked ability 
— chief among them, perhaps, Prof. Caleb Win- 
chester, head of the department of English. 
The faculty contained strong men also in Dr. 
W. O. Atwater, the chemist, and Prof. W. North 
Rice. 



102 WOODROW WILSON 

The university is most fortunately and beau- 
tifully situated, stretching along a ridge above 
the Connecticut Valley and overlooking pleasing 
prospects. Middletown is a place of elms and 
old colonial mansions. The Wilson residence 
was just across from the college grounds, look- 
ing out over the valley. Though formally under 
Methodist control, the university is really non- 
sectarian and liberal in the best sense. It was 
then co-educational, but only five or six young 
w^omen were at that time in each class. The 
student-body was made up, as it still is, of likely 
young fellows from what we might describe as 
the middle wallvs of life; Wesley an was not a 
rich man's college. 

From the start. Professor Wilson's courses 
were extremely popular. And well indeed they 
might be; for New England had rarely heard 
such instruction as was given in the lecture-room 
of Wesleyan's professor of history and political 
economy. W^hile at Middletown he continued 
his lectureship at Johns Hopkins ; now, however, 
instead of going down once a week, he bunched 
bis twenty-five lectures in a month of vacation 



"PROFESSOR" WILSON 103 

allowed him by the Wesley an trustees. His 
fame as a popular lecturer also was growing 
apace, and he was frequently called to give ad- 
dresses in New England and the Eastern States. 
It was while at Middletown that he wrote *'The 
State," a volume which, with less pretentions 
to literary form than his other work, involved 
an enormous amount of labor. 

Mr. Wilson was a member of the Athletic 
Committee of Wesleyan and took the keenest 
interest in the college sports. One student of 
the time remembers how incensed he became at 
the limited ambition of the Wesleyan boys who, 
when they played against Yale, were satisfied 
only to keep the score down. "That's no am- 
bition at all," he used to cry. "Go in and win; 
you can lick Yale as well as any other team. 
Go after their scalps. Don't admit for a 
moment that they can beat you." Is it possible 
that this gallant encouragement drew any of its 
warmth from the traditional hatred of Eli and 
the Tiger? 

Life at Middletown was pleasant. But Mr. 
Wilson's growing reputation would not permit 



104 WOODROW WILSON 

him to remain there. When in 1890 the chair 
of jurisprudence and poHtics in Princeton Col- 
lege became vacant through the death of Prof. 
Alexander Johnson, the trustees elected to it the 
Princeton graduate who had so quickly distin- 
guished himself as a student of politics. 

September, 1890, then, found Woodrow Wil- 
son again domiciled in the Jersey collegiate town 
which, fifteen years before, he had first gazed 
'round upon w ith the eyes of a raw student from 
the South. He was now a man whose renown had 
begun to spread in the world, an author, a public 
speaker of enviable repute, the head of a family, 
a figure of consideration, a Doctor, if you please, 
both of Philosophy and of Law. 

The W^ilsons rented a house in Library Place. 
After a few years they built a home for them- 
selves on an adjoining lot, an attractive half- 
timbered house designed by Mrs. W^ilson. 

The new professor stepped at once into the 
front rank, as indeed became a Princeton grad- 
uate, a member of one of the most famous classes 
the old college had graduated, a man thoroughly 




niuo^Tnin 



THE MANSE, STAUNTON, VIRGINIA, WHERE WOODROW WILSON 
WAS BORN 




THE HOUSE DESIGNED BY WOODROW WILSON AT PRINCETON 



"PROFESSOR" WILSON 105 

imbued with the best traditions of the place. 
But his lectures — Princeton had no tradition 
that accounted for their charm. They instantly 
became popular; the attendance mounted until 
it surpassed that ever before or since given any 
course of study at Princeton; before long very 
nearly four hundred students, almost the total 
number of juniors and seniors combined, were 
taking Wilson's courses — and they were no 
"cinches" either. Widely informed, marked 
by a mastery of fact even to slight detail, inspir- 
ing in their range and sweep, and spiced with a 
pervading sense of humor. Professor Wilson's 
lectures were further marked by the great free- 
dom with which he delivered himself of his 
views on current events. It was his custom to 
put students on their honor not to report him; 
there were always likely to be in attendance 
students who had connections wath city news- 
papers who might frequently have made good 
"stories" out of the professor's lively comments 
on the politics of the day, but none ever took 
advantage of the opportunity. 

The classes were now so large that the work 



106 WOODROW WILSON 

of a professor consisted almost entirely of lec- 
turing. As we shall see later, it was not then 
the Princeton idea to give the students any par- 
ticular oversight or inspiration elsewhere than 
in the classroom; yet the Wilson home became, 
and always remained, a resort hugely popular 
with the young men who were so lucky as to be 
admitted to it — and its doors were hospitably 
hung. Professor W^ilson, in short, stepped into 
the position of first favorite, alike with his col- 
leagues of the faculty and with the undergrads. 
They have at Princeton a way of voting at the 
end of each year for all possible sorts of 
"popular personages." For a number of years 
Professor W^ilson was voted the most popular 
professor. He was able, he was genial, he was 
active; a member of the faculty committee on 
outdoor sports, and of the faculty committee on 
discipline. In faculty meetings Mr. Wilson 
soon became one of those most attentively 
listened to. Though meetings were generally 
informal, occasionally there was a debate in 
which his quite remarkable powers showed at 
their best. 



"PROFESSOR" WILSON 107 

During the twelve years, 1890 to 1902, Mr. 
Wilson continued to fulfil at Princeton the du- 
ties of professor of jurisprudence and politics. 
They were twelve years of steady, yet pleasant 
labor; years of growth and of growing influence, 
both in the university and in the country. Four 
new books were added to the list signed by this 
man who wrote history and politics with so 
much literary charm : ' ' Division and Reunion, ' ' 
''An Old Master," "Mere Literature," and 
"George W^ashington." He was heard now in 
occasional addresses in many parts of the land 
— discussing public questions before commercial, 
industrial, and professional bodies. The vigor 
of his views on questions of the day, as well as 
his readiness, grace, and power on the platform, 
gave him place among the recognized leaders 
of national thought. He had for a time con- 
tinued going down to Johns Hopkins, and now 
he gave occasional lectures at the New York 
Law School. 

At the end of a decade in his chair Mr. Wilson 
had attained, naturally, and with the good will 
of all, a position of unchallenged supremacy in 



108 WOODROW WILSON 

the university town and of marked distinction 
in the country. 

With such brief summary this biography must 
dismiss a period the external facts of which were 
of Httle dramatic value — incommensurate al- 
together with their importance in the develop- 
ment and strengthening of conviction and char- 
acter which were to have play in the time which 
we now approach. 

As one looks into those twelve years and (to 
the eye that regards merely externals their 
somewhat prosaic events, what chiefly impresses 
him in the man is the growth in vividness of 
his social sense, his love of humanity — express- 
ing itself most commonly in terms of patriotism. 
It is clear too that he is winning some wise in- 
sight into the mystery of the unfolding of the 
minds of young men ; acquiring much skill in the 
craft of the teacher and reaching withal some 
conclusions respecting principles and methods 
of education. But beyond and above all other 
convictions that ripened during these twelve 
years in the enlivening companionship of stu- 
dents, in the joyful exercise before them of his 



^'PROFESSOR" WILSON 109 

gift of speech, and in the lonely stillness of a 
heart that pondered the history of human insti- 
tutions and the laws of progress, there grew up 
in Woodrow Wilson a fervent devotion to democ- 
racy. You cannot understand the man from 
this time forth, you cannot follow the battle of 
the next few years through the intricate alleys 
through which it raged, unless you are always 
conscious that you are beholding a scene in which 
the central figure is that of a prophet inspired 
by a passionate sense of the majesty of the law 
of social justice; a warrior burning with abhor- 
rence~orsecret things, of things that divide and 
isolate, hot with hatred of the artificial distinc- 
tion, the unearned privilege, the unequal oppor- 
tunity ; a knight animated by a loving tenderness 
for the man at the bottom, a tenderness not 
sentimental, but born in reason — like the 
reverent regard of the philosopher for the lowly 
root and the good homely soil from which it 
pleases God to nourish the flower that nods in 
acknowledged beauty in the air above. 

All this you would discern if you studied the 
speeches and read the books and listened to his 



no WOODROW WILSON 

pupils describe the spirit of the lectures of the 
Princeton professor. But you will see it all 
manifest in action when he exchanges his pro- 
fessional for an executive office. 

Princeton, like other American colleges, had 
been going through a period of change. The 
serious-minded men of an earlier generation, 
intent on fitting themselves for a learned profes- 
sion, and therefore eager to study — and to 
study the old tripod, Greek, Latin, and Mathe- 
matics — had been swamped by an influx of 
fellows of a new sort — fellows who came to 
college to stay for a few jolly years on the way 
to business. They had no intention of doing 
more than the authorities required, and Prince- 
ton had fallen into the habit of requiring little, 
either in the way of study or discipline. Presi- 
dent Francis Landey Patton, the brilliant 
scholar who would have been in his glory at the 
head of a college of an earlier day, found the new 
tasks irksome and impossible, and in June, 1902, 
resigned them. 

There seems to have been no discussion as to 



« 






"PROFESSOR" WILSON 111 

the successorship. It appears to have been the 
most natural thing in the world that it should 
fall to the Princeton man who had made a great 
name for himself in the world of books and of 
scholarship; who had been one of the most 
active members of the faculty; and who, above 
all, by his oratorical powers could best represent 
the college in the great world. Wilson, there- 
fore, was chosen, and the announcement was 
made on Commencement Day. 



CHAPTER VII 

Princeton's new president 

THE presidency of Princeton University 
is a position of dignity and considera- 
tion. The long line of men, reaching 
back one hundred and sixty years, who had filled 
it, were, each in his time, among the most dis- 
tinguished divines and scholars of the land. By 
a sort of instinct, or chance — such as that which 
had at the beginning named the college hall 
Nassau rather than Belcher — Princeton had 
gravitated toward the aristocratic. Latterly, 
the university had come to be known as "the 
most charming country club in America." Its 
retiring head had avowed it impossible that it 
should be other than a college for rich men's 
sons. , 

Whatever may have been expected of him, it 
was impossible for the new president (who by 
the way was the first layman to occupy the 

112 



PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 113 

chair) to fall into the easeful tradition of the 
office. It was impossible for him merely to 
institute a few necessary reforms and let things 
go on much as before. He had scarcely been 
inaugurated when everybody became aware 
that, for good or ill, the Judgment Day had 
dawned over the quiet campus and the ivied 
halls. There was to be no lack of initiative, no 
fearf ulness and trembling before novel proposals, 
no shirking of responsibility, no failure of nerve. 
There was no undue precipitancy. President 
Wilson spent a year studying conditions — he 
already knew them pretty well — from his 
new vantage-point. He did not, however, feel 
any necessity of awaiting the lapse of a year 
before undertaking to bring the scholarship and 
the discipline of the school up to what it already 
was on paper. He assigned this work to a com- 
mittee on examination and standing, at the head 
of which he appointed Professor, now Dean, 
Harry Fine. Students who failed to pass their 
examinations were dropped, rich or poor, with 
or without social "pull." Work was absolutely 
demanded. 



114 WOODROW WILSON 

There was, of course, an immense sensation 
when the Princeton students found that, from 
that day forth, they must go to work. Work 
had not been a Princeton tradition. The rever- 
berations of indignation rolled through the skies 
for several years, until there came in a new body 
of students, prepared and willing to live up to 
the new standards. 

During that first year also a committee on 
revision of the course of study was appointed to 
report the following year. 

If Princeton was to be a place of work, it was 
to be fruitful work, work worth doing, worth 
taking four years out of a young man's life to do. 
It was to be, above all, as President Wilson saw 
it and continually phrased it, work that would 
fit a young man to serve his country better — 
by which I suppose he meant serve it by living as 
a citizen, an employer, a man of business, that 
larger and fuller life which true education im- 
parts. 

He even went so far as to say that he wanted 
the university to make its graduates henceforth 



PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 115 

as unlike their fathers as possible — by which, 
of course, he meant that fathers, being settled 
in their opinions and in reverence for what is 
established, have a part to play different from 
that of sons, who particularly must sympathize 
with the re-creative and re-formative processes of 
life and society. That saying blanched the 
cheek of many an elderly Princetonian; it was 
spoken in an understanding of the necessity 
of opening college doors to the new facts which 
modern science has added to the store of human 
knowledge; spoken, also, in appreciation of the 
new social conscience that has been born in the 
world, though it is so slow in coming to the birth 
in colleges. 

First, of course, a university that would serve 
the nation must take into its course of study — 
its system of intellectual training — the mass of 
new knowledge of which the old curriculum was 
ignorant; the college course of the fathers of the 
present generation had become an anachronism. 

If it had fallen to President Eliot of Harvard 
to proclaim the new age in which the old edu- 
cational ideas had ceased to suffice, Princeton, 



116 WOODROW WILSON 

under the presidency of Wilson, now took up the 
completing work of positively constructing a 
system which should contain the new ideas, the 
new subjects; and not only contain them, but 
organize them, coordinate them, put them into 
proper sequence and relation. 

We are here in a region of big things in the 
educational world, yet (so little do most of us 
concern ourselves wdth questions of education, 
which do so profoundly concern the future) it 
would doubtless be unwise to dwell on them. 

President Wilson's committee, after months 
of labor, the freed and enthusiastic labor of eager 
men, promulgated a revised — or rather new — 
system of collegiate study. It was the first 
positive attempt made to bring the new college 
education into intelligent and systematic re- 
lationships as a body of discipline. All interested 
in education know of the revolution wrought by 
the "department system" that has ever since 
prevailed at Princeton; while it offered the 
widest scope for the "election" of studies, it 
practically assured that the studies "elected" 
should lead to one settled purpose — that is, 



PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 117 

it intelligently coordinated a student's work; it 
turned him out of college not with a smattering of 
a thousand subjects, but with a pretty thorough 
training in some one broad group of subjects. 
President Wilson is entitled to the credit of 
presiding over this revision. He did not him- 
self work it out in detail. Possibly he contrib- 
uted at the outset little more than the "group 
system" idea already used at Bryn Mawr. But 
from this germinal idea the plan grew into a 
great architectural scheme. The educational 
edifice now erected was a fabric of fine articula- 
tion, of nice adjustment. It was a first evidence 
and result of that principle of Wilson's mind 
which demands coordination and right relation- 
ship — and it was the first step toward the 
transformation of Princeton into a university 
for the people. 

President Wilson's next step was to commit 
Princeton to the revolution that has come about 
with the adoption of the preceptorial system. It 
was his idea that the university had grown too 
large longer to train its students merely through 



118 WOODROW \MLSON 

lectures and examinations. There was no pro- 
vision for the students outside of the classrooms. 
What they did elsewhere, where they lived, what 
they talked about, with whom they associated, 
what books they read, what ideals of life were 
held up before them — with all these, the uni- 
versity in the days before had had nothing to do. 
Fifteen hours a week in lecture-rooms rep- 
resented the only opportunity possessed by the 
faculty to "educate" the men. All this, said 
the president, must be changed. These young 
men must not be turned out into the street to 
go and come without direction, without proper 
companionship, without inspiration, during the 
other one hundred and fifty hours of the week. 
His idea was to put the students more intimately 
into association with a body of young instructors 
who were to afford the undergrads friendly 
companionship and oversight. Formal recita- 
tions were largely abolished. Men studied sub- 
jects; they did not merely '*take courses." 
Constant informal, personal contact between 
students and faculty was the keynote of the 
new plan. 



PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 119 

To this idea also there was Kttle objection, 
though some of the trustees and perhaps a few 
of the faculty began to get a little uneasy at so 
far leaving the old ruts. Long after the pre- 
ceptorial system had been put in operation it 
was brought up against President Wilson that 
he had inaugurated it on his own dictum with- 
out having consulted the faculty. 

The cost of the preceptorial system was very 
great, approximately $100,000 a year. It was 
determined to raise at least a part of this by sub- 
scriptions from the alumni. Possibly this deter- 
mination was a practical error; for it gave the 
alumni an influence and voice in the manage- 
ment of the university, especially it gave them 
a degree of control over the teaching system 
which has not thus far been particularly happy 
in its results. The new does not always flourish 
best under the too close shade of the old. The 
original idea was that graduate classes should en- 
dow, each of them, two or three preceptorships. 
This was so modified that classes were allowed 
to contribute annually the salaries of preceptors 
in lieu of the capital for a foundation. 



no WOODROW WILSON 

The preceptorial system was established, and 
became a distinctive feature of Princeton life. 
In connection with the new curriculum, it 
worked — call it a miracle, and you use none 
too strong a word. It created a new Princeton, 
a place no longer of set tasks, recitations and 
examinations unhappily breaking into the pleas- 
ant days of good-fellowship and sport; but a 
place where, to a considerable degree at least, 
good-fellowship was seen to be compatible with 
study, and study to be not necessarily a grind. 
The minds of hundreds of students were eman- 
cipated and stimulated; the place pulsated with 
a new sort of spontaneity and zest. 

Princeton University, which, when the last 
president resigned, was in such a case that, 
according to a trustee of the day, its career 
"threatened to end in its virtual extinction" as 
an important educational influence in America, 
was attracting the surprised attention of the 
country. It had a constructive programme. It 
had a leader, and a harmonious faculty, and it 
had at least an acquiescent board of trustees. 

Alas ! that the further steps in that programme. 



PRINCETON'S NEW PRESIDENT 121 

the further ends to which the leader's clear vision 
and firm purpose looked, meant — democracy, 
Alas! that the educational revolution could not 
have proceeded without laying its irreverent 
hand on what the spirit of old Princeton recog- 
nized as the sacred ark of social privilege ! Alas ! 
that it showed so much more concern for man- 
hood than for — money ! 



CHAPTER VIII 

DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 

DOCTOR WILSON had served five 
years as president of Princeton Uni- 
versity before he reached the point of 
irrepressible conflict. So long as he confined 
himself to the strictly educational workings 
of the school he had been allowed to have his 
way without much opposition. But now, when 
his constructive mind reached over to the 
student's social life and undertook to organize 
that and bring it into proper relationship with 
the other elements of university life, he found 
that he had put his hand upon what the guard- 
ians of the aristocratic institution were really 
interested in and what they were not disposed to 
see changed. Having revised the system of 
study, and having refashioned the teaching 
plan, he had now reached the point where he 
believed it necessary to reconstruct the extra- 

122 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 123 

collegiate relations — that is, the ordinary living 
arrangements of the place — taking them in as 
a necessary part of the total university plan. 
He felt the necessity of assuming charge of the 
housing and boarding of the students, and of 
doing this in a way most advantageous to the 
young men. 

In brief, his idea was the organization of the 
university in a number of "colleges" or '* quad- 
rangles" — practically dormitories — each of 
which should harbor a certain number of men 
from every class, with a few of the younger pro- 
fessors. It was not a new idea with President 
Wilson; people remembered that he had talked 
of it at least ten years before he became presi- 
dent. It was precisely in line with the pre- 
ceptorial plan; indeed, it was the necessary 
culmination of that plan. President Wilson had 
no notion of dividing Princeton University into 
colleges at all like those which constitute 
Oxford University or Cambridge, for example. 
The university was still to carry on all instruc- 
tion and maintain its authority everywhere. 
The "quads" were to be merely residence halls, 



124 WOODROW WILSON 

each of which with its dining-room and common- 
room was to be a Httle w orld in itself — such a 
world as the university by reason of its size 
could no longer be. 

President Wilson secured the appointment of 
a committee consisting of seven of the trustees 
to investigate the merits of the "quad" proposal, 
and at the June, 1907, meeting the committee 
reported on "the social coordination of the 
university," endorsing Mr. Wilson's plan. The 
report of this committee was accepted, and its 
recommendation adopted, with only one dissent- 
ing vote, twenty-five of the twenty-seven trus- 
tees being present, at the June meeting. 

Now% it is probable that President W^ilson did 
not hit upon his "quad" plan primarily as a 
means of reforming the social life of Princeton. 
He reached it rather as a student of education. 
It was very clear to him that fifteen hours a 
week out of one hundred and sixty-eight is not 
enough in which to "educate" a young man. 
It was further evident to him that the associa- 
tion of new students with older students and pro- 
fessors was exceedingly to be desired; he knew 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 125 

that a freshman learned far more from the class- 
men above him and from association with his 
instructors between lectures than he learned 
from the lectures themselves; he became con- 
vinced of the advisability of cutting across the 
lines of class isolation ; his proposal was to divide 
the university perpendicularly rather than hori- 
zontally. 

What was amiss with the ''quad" proposal? 

This — that it cut into the aristocratic social 
structure which the dominating element in 
Princeton had erected for itself. 

If, visiting Princeton, you will proceed to 
the top of a street known as Prospect Avenue, 
and pass down it, you will see something which 
probably is not paralleled at any seat of learning 
in the world. Prospect Avenue is lined with 
club-houses, twelve of them, with handsome 
buildings, beautiful lawns, and tennis courts, and, 
in the case of the more favored clubs on the south 
side of the street, a delightful view across the 
valley to the eastward. Some of the club-houses 
are sumptuous, comparing very favorably with 



126 WOODROW WILSON 

the best city clubs. Their aggregate value must 
be much more than $1,000,000. The clubs 
house, on an average, thirty members each — 
fifteen juniors and fifteen seniors, about 350 in 
all, juniors and seniors alone being eligible. 
Three hundred other members of those classes 
can get into no club. Freshmen and sophomores 
can only look forward to admission to them. 

Princeton has long forbidden the formation 
of fraternity chapters; students are required on 
matriculation to take oath that they will join 
no fraternities. The clubs are the comparatively 
recent outgrowth of eating associations. The 
university has never provided any eating-places 
for the students. Some thirty years ago the 
members of an eating-club which called itself 
the "Ivy" conceived the idea of perpetuating 
itself. From this idea has grown up this 
dominating feature of Princeton life, estranged 
from the university and yet having more to do 
with the real forming of its students than any 
other feature of the college life. 

No one can reflect for a moment upon this 
club system without understanding its essen- 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 127 

tially vicious character. Perhaps only those 
who have Hved at Princeton thoroughly under- 
stand how extremely vicious the system is. At 
the outset it ought to be made clear that no 
reflection of any sort or kind is or can be cast 
upon the morality of the clubs. They are well 
managed; they are delightful homes; they as- 
semble groups of undoubtedly fine and gentle- 
manly men. No drinking is allowed, and in no 
particular has there ever been the slightest 
scandal about their conduct. 

The trouble is that they necessarily constitute 
an aristocracy, in the midst of a community 
which should, above all things, be absolutely 
democratic. It may be all very well for the three 
hundred youths who enjoy the delights of the 
"Ivy," the "Cap and Gown," the "Colonial," 
"Tiger Inn," and the rest (though such luxury 
is of questionable value to a boy who has yet 
to make his way in the world), but what of the 
three hundred young men who have not been 
able to "make" one of them.^ They feel them- 
selves ostracized and humiliated, and the seeds 
of social bitterness are sown in their souls. 



128 WOODROW WILSON 

There is no provision for them outside of com- 
mon boarding-houses. Not a few leave the 
university. 

Worse yet, rivalry for admission to the clubs 
is so great that it injures the work of the fresh- 
men and sophomores. The first term of the 
sophomore year, especially, is considered to be 
entirely wrecked by the absorption of the stu- 
dents in candidating for the club elections held 
that spring. True, from time to time the clubs 
enter into treaties pledging themselves to ab- 
stain from soliciting desirable sophomores — 
and the result of that, when the treaties are 
lived up to, is to make impossible any friendship, 
no matter how natural or desirable, between a 
sophomore and an upper classman; and when 
they are not lived up to, to supplant free natural 
intimacies with secret politics. So highly is 
membership in a swagger club regarded, that 
parents of prospective students have been 
known to begin visits to Princeton a year or 
two before their son entered college, with the 
purpose of organizing a social campaign to land 
him in the club to which he aspired. 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 129 

It may easily be seen how the existence of 
these select coteries minister to snobbery; how 
they foster toadying; how they introduce a 
worldly, material, and unnatural element into 
what is naturally one of the finest things in the 
world — a democracy of boys; how they set up 
at the outset of a student's career a mistaken 
ideal, an unworthy aim; and how they divide 
students along unnatural lines. Over and over 
again, Princeton sees a group of congenial fel- 
lows of the incoming freshman class gravitate 
toward each other in the first few weeks of the 
term, and then, in obedience to some sudden, 
mysterious influence from Prospect Avenue, 
dissolve. The members of this group soon, 
perhaps, find themselves in friendly associations 
in some other direction, but again these asso- 
ciations also are broken up. The spirit of the 
place does not allow men to form friendly and 
natural associations in accordance with their 
tastes and dispositions; they must always strive 
to become friends of those particular classmates 
who have the best chance of "making" the best 
clubs, and as "the hunch" passes "down the 



130 WOODROW WILSON 

line" from Prospect Avenue, the prospects of 
one and another student wax and wane, and the 
character of the coteries in which he finds him- 
self goes up and down. The social life of the 
two lower classes presents such a picture as 
would a layer of iron filings over which a magnet 
is passed, forming groups now here, now there, 
and keeping all in constant confusion. So 
Princeton's clubs continually agitate the under- 
graduate life, prevent the forming of natural 
friendships, beget snobbery, set up an aristoc- 
racy, condemn half the student body to an 
inferior social position, and make the chief prize 
of the student's career, not the attainment of an 
education, but membership in a favored group. 
In the words of President Wilson, the side-show 
had swallowed up the circus. Nothing could be 
more un-American; nothing could be more op- 
posed to the true principles of education. 

We approach now one of the most dramatic, 
as it is one of the most involved, chapters in the 
life of any American institution of learning — 
indeed a chapter, if it could be rightly told, not 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 131 

often excelled in interest in any story of Ameri- 
can life. To appreciate the emotions which 
were stirred, the passions which were aroused, 
the bitterness engendered, the life-long estrange- 
ments created, by what outsiders may easily 
regard as a slight academical question, it is 
necessary to consider that a university town 
constitutes a peculiarly isolated microcosm in 
itself. Its own affairs loom very large to the 
members of a university, and, indeed, very large 
in their expansive influence they are. In such a 
place as Princeton are gathered men of ability 
and force of character much above the average; 
men likely to be of strong convictions, which 
they are well able to express. Ambitions have 
their play, too, in the college world; jealousies 
are easily aroused, as well as extraordinarily 
devoted friendships cemented. 

In Princeton, too, there had grown up a 
certain duality of thought and ruling ideal. The 
town had become the chosen residence of a 
number of families of wealth, some of them of 
very great wealth. Having been for a number 
of years a school very easy-going as to scholar- 



13^2 WOODROW \YILSON 

ship and discipline, it had become a favored 
resort of rich men's sons. Over against the 
wealthy residents (none of whom, it should be 
said, w^ere vulgar of display; most of whom, on 
the other hand, were cultured Christian people 
of high instincts, the unconscious habits of 
whose minds only it was that separated them 
instinctiveh^ from sympathy with the less 
wealthy); over against the students with auto- 
mobiles who ran over to Philadelphia or New 
York at week-ends or entertained small parties 
at the Inn — there was a body of somewhat 
slenderly paid professors and of students who 
had been enabled to take a college course only 
through the sacrifices of their parents. The 
Princeton world was a fair epitome of modern 
America; there was httle vice in it; there was 
Httle conscious estranging pride; there was no 
acknowledged dislike of the rich on the part of 
the less fortunate; but there was the growing 
prominence of wealth and an increasing exhiVji- 
tion of its necessary power, and the gradual 
assertion of that power in forgetfulness of the 
needs of the poor. In short, there was at Prince- 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 133 

ton all the elements that go to make up the 
drama of life, and these so assembled in a small 
community that their action and reaction could 
be easily watched. A novelist might have 
found at Princeton in the years 1907-11 material 
for the American novel. 

A circular setting forth in outline President 
Wilson's "quad" proposal was sent to the 
various clubs and was generally read there on 
the Friday night before Commencement, 1907. 
Princeton alumni, particularly those from the 
Eastern cities, come back in large numbers to 
their alma mater and usually "put up" at the 
club-houses, where the Friday night preceding 
Commencement is given over to a jolly dinner. 
The "quad" proposal, it was instantly seen, 
contemplated the doing away of the clubs; it was 
even said that Wilson proposed to confiscate 
them. The wrath of the alumni jollifying that 
night in Prospect Avenue was instantly aroused, 
and the shout of battle was raised. No decent 
consideration was ever given the new idea. 
The grieved graduates went home to spread 
stories of the attack on Princeton's favorite 



134 WOODROW WILSON 

institutions and rally the old boys to their 
defence. Old Princetonians wrote distressed 
letters to the Alumni Weekly expressing their 
grief and astonishment that a Princeton presi- 
dent should so far forget himself as to try to 
"make a gentleman chum with a mucker"; they 
wanted to know what the world was coming to 
when a man was to be "compelled to submit 
to dictation as to his table companions"; in the 
holy name of liberty and the good old Princeton 
spirit they swore to preserve for the student 
"the right to decide for himself whom he will 
associate with." 

The trustees, who had voted the plan through 
with but a single dissenting voice, now frightened 
by the alumni howl, were persuaded to recon- 
sider. On October 17th the Board requested 
President Wilson to withdraw the proposal. 

The inalienable right of the American college 
youth to choose his own hat-band (and compel 
other youths to wear untrimmed head-gear) 
was thus triumphantly vindicated. But the 
saviors of the club system were not generous in 
victory. They continued to hurl insults upon 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 135 

President Wilson. It was now discovered that 
he was a domineering, brutal, bigoted, incon- 
siderate, and untruthful demagogue. The pre- 
ceptorial system, which had been in operation 
for two years, with everybody's approval, 
was now also attacked. President Wilson was 
charged with having inaugurated it over the 
heads of the faculty; various classes among the 
alumni withdrew their subscriptions for the 
support of preceptors. It took only a few 
months of this sort of thing for the Board of 
Trustees, the faculty, and the alumni to find 
themselves divided beyond compromise. Life- 
long friendships were broken. Life-long as- 
sociates parted in bitterness. Charges and 
countercharges were exchanged. The chasm 
deepened, and passions so violent that It would 
not have been deemed possible for a collegiate 
to possess them, were aroused. 

It is a little difficult to see why the question 
should have provoked the astonishingly bitter 
fight which now broke out at Princeton. To 
find the real cause of it all one must go deeper 
than the issue presented on the surface, much 



136 WOODROW WILSON 

deeper than the mere personaUty of the presi- 
dent. As to the latter, it is quite possible that 
Doctor Wilson's positive character, the certainty 
of his convictions and his aggressiveness in ex- 
pressing them, may have been distasteful to men 
long accustomed to other methods. It is even 
possible that the president was not as gentle in 
his manner, perhaps not always as tactful, as 
he might have been, as he has since become. 
Undoubtedly a man of exceeding charm of per- 
sonality, he had his grim side — no man de- 
scended from a line of Scottish Presbyterians has 
not — and, once aroused in a fight, he was a ruth- 
less opponent. It seems to be the case that the 
president's reform programme grew primarily 
out of his convictions as a teacher of young men. 
He did not, for instance, deliberately set about 
to attack the Princeton clubs; he only found 
that they were in the way of a better educational 
plan, the adoption of which he deemed neces- 
sary. But when the host gathered for the de- 
fence of an aristocratic institution because it 
was aristocratic, when they denounced him as a 
confiscator, a leveler, and a Socialist, the innate 



DEMOCRACY OR ARISTOCRACY? 137 

democracy of the man flamed up, and the fight 
ceased to be a debate over educational ideals, 
having become an irreconcilable conflict between 
democracy and privileged wealth. 

President Wilson continued to expound his 
ideas on the subject of the social organization 
of the university when invited to do so at gather- 
ings of the alumni in various cities, but he 
made no aggressive campaign. The preceptorial 
system, in spite of the growing prejudice against 
it, continued in vogue, the necessary funds being 
voted by the trustees. 

Before we turn from the events of '07, it may 
be worth while to note that, though his plan was 
for the present defeated, Mr. Wilson was still 
meditating on the necessity of making Prince- 
ton democratic. In October, a graduate, Mr. 
E. B. Seymour, called on President Wilson and 
had an interesting talk. Though he disagreed 
with the president's conclusions, Mr. Seymour 
thus reports Mr. Wilson s views: 

He felt that in this country at the present time there 
was too strong a tendency to glorify money merely. That 
with the increasing wealth of the country this tendency 



138 WOODROW WILSON 

would be accentuated. In short, he feared that we would 
rapidly drift into a plutocracy. To meet this condition 
he felt that the corrective of an education along purely 
democratic lines should be given to our boys in our insti- 
tutions of higher learning. At Princeton, whither come 
many sons of millionaires, he felt we should so impress 
these boys with ideas of democracy and personal worth 
that when they became, in the ordinary course of nature, 
masters of their father's fortunes, they should so use their 
undoubted power as to help, not hurt, the commonwealth. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 

THE story now becomes complicated 
through the injection of another issue, 
that, namely, of the graduate college. 
Some time before the election of Professor 
Wilson to the presidency, Prof. Andrew F. West, 
a brilliant and persuasive member of the fac- 
ulty, with ambitions, had been given the title of 
Dean of the Graduate School, together with an 
appropriation of $2,500 to be used in studying 
graduate systems of instruction in various univer- 
sities. Dean West went to Europe for a year, 
returned, and published a sumptuous little 
volume containing an elaborate and highly illus- 
trated scheme for a graduate college. It was 
never seen by the faculty, although President 
Wilson, in off-hand good-will for the general idea 
of graduate development, contributed a pref- 
ace; the book was sent by Dean West to likely 

139 



140 WOODROW WILSON 

contributors among the alumni. In 1906 Doc- 
tor West was invited to the presidency of the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A 
meeting of a trustees' committee adopted a 
resolution expressing the hope that he remain, 
as the Board had counted upon him to put into 
operation the graduate school. Dean West de- 
clined the call to Boston. 

In December of that year, Mrs. J. A. Thomp- 
son Swann, dying, left $250,000 for the beginning 
of a graduate college; among the conditions of 
the gift was the provision that the new college 
should be located upon grounds of the university. 
The trustees decided to build it on the site of 
the president's house, ''Prospect," and the 
university's consulting architect, Mr. Cram, 
was instructed to draw the plans. 

In the spring of 1909, through the influence 
of Dean West, Mr. WilKam C. Proctor of Cin- 
cinnati offered $500,000 for the graduate college 
on condition that another half million dollars 
be raised. Mr. Proctor's letter seemed to 
imply that the money must be used in carrying 
out the scheme formulated by Dean W^est; it 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 141 

also condemned the site chosen for the graduate 
college by the trustees. In his second letter, 
addressed to President Wilson, Mr. Proctor 
named two locations which alone would be 
acceptable to him. 

So long as Dean West's scheme for a graduate 
school was a paper plan only, it had received no 
special examination. But when these two be- 
quests made its realization possible, the plan was 
given scrutiny. It was apparent to many of the 
trustees and faculty that Dean West's elaborate 
plan was not one to which they were prepared 
to commit themselves definitely. A special 
committee of five, appointed by the president of 
the Board of Trustees, reported (February 10, 
1910) against the unconditional acceptance of 
Mr. Proctor's gift. They felt that graduate 
work at Princeton was still in its formative 
period; conditions surrounding it were as yet 
experimental, and it would be a mistake to let 
the organization, development, and conduct of a 
graduate college pass in any measure outside 
the control of the university faculty and Board. 
The sites which Mr. Proctor insisted upon were 



142 WOODROW WILSON 

remote from the university centre, and the com- 
mittee felt that this was a vital mistake. It 
was an extremely delicate matter to look the 
gift-horse in the mouth, but so plain was their 
duty that they, therefore, called Mr. Proctor's 
attention to the fact that Dean West's plan was 
merely a tentative one which had never been 
adopted in its entirety and that the matter of 
the location of the graduate college seemed to 
them to be so important that it could not be 
decided off-hand by a donor, however generous ; 
in short, they desired to know whether the pros- 
pective gift was to place in the hands of the 
authorized guardians of the university a sum of 
money to be used according to their best ideas 
of the needs of the university, or to be spent 
precisely as the donor desired. 

Mr. Proctor's answer was a withdrawal of 
his offer. 

The withdrawal naturally caused a sensation 
and brought down upon the head of President 
Wilson all the vials of wrath that had not been 
already emptied upon him. It was inconceiv- 
able to some in the Board of Trustees, to a large 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 143 

number of the alumni, and to a portion of the 
faculty, that a gift of half a million dollars 
(carrying with it indeed the prospect of another 
half million — for this had already been nearly 
subscribed) could be rejected, on any considera- 
tion whatsoever. Any one who knows how 
eagerly funds are sought by the trustees of 
philanthropic and educational institutions can 
perhaps understand the amazement with which 
many of the graduates of a college heard that its 
president had actually turned down the prospect 
of getting a million dollars. But in view of the 
perfectly clear position taken by President Wil- 
son, backed at that time by the majority of the 
trustees, the passionate outcry against them 
shown by some Princetonians of general repute 
for intelligence and conscience, does seem inex- 
plicable. It was a perfectly clear case. Pres- 
ident Wilson and the trustees were no doubt 
infinitely obliged to Mr. Proctor; they were eager 
to accept his gift, but they simply could not 
abrogate the duties of their office — they simply 
could not surrender to any donor the right to 
determine the university's policy in so grave a 



144 WOODROW WILSON 

matter as that of its graduate school. It was 
they who were charged with the duty of ad- 
ministering the university — not Mr. Proctor. 
It would have been fatal for them to admit the 
principle that a rich man who was willing to 
give away money should, therefore, be given 
the right to dictate the educational policy of the 
institution of which others were the elected 
officers. They were not there to allow a private 
plan to be imposed upon the university, deter- 
mining its future. 

Furthermore, the particular plan which un- 
conditional acceptance of Mr. Proctor's gift 
would have forced on Princeton was one utterly 
opposed to the principles in devotion to which 
the university under its president's guidance 
was now so happily advancing. 

To President Wilson its details were altogether 
obnoxious. Since the subject of graduate study 
had been taken up, the dean and the president 
had moved in opposite directions: one toward 
segregation and exclusiveness; the other toward 
an organic whole, cooperative, shot through 
with a common motive and spirit, and stimu- 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 145 

lated by a common life of give and take. Doctor 
West now proposed the erection, in a distant part 
of town, of a sumptuous building where a selected 
group of young gentlemen of peculiar refinement 
were to live in cloistered seclusion the life of 
culture. President Wilson had his own plan 
for a graduate school — a plan that sprang 
naturally out of the new system of studies and 
the preceptorial organization — but it was a 
plan that contemplated a corps of highly com- 
petent graduate instructors, proper laboratories, 
an adequate library, and the practical essen- 
tials of study — rather than the embroidery of 
fine buildings and seclusion. "A university 
does not consist of buildings or of apparatus," 
he said. *'A university consists of students 
and teachers." He looked on Dean West's 
plan as frivolous and unworthy of an American 
university conscious of its duty to the nation. 
He argued that graduate students being gener- 
ally mature men minded to pursue practical pro- 
fessional studies, an elaborate and peculiar and 
ornamented scheme like Dean West's would 
repel rather than attract them. 



146 WOODROW WILSON 

The fact of the matter is, he didn't want a 
hundred nice young gentlemen to come to 
Princeton and Hve apart pursuing the higher 
culture. The notion violated the ideal of 
democracy, deliberately set about to create a 
scholarly aristocracy, introduced a further ele- 
ment of disintegration — when what Princeton 
needed was integration. His own thought was 
aflame with the picture of a great democratic 
society of students in which under-graduates 
and post-graduates should meet and mingle, 
the contagion of education flying like sparks 
struck out by the clash of mind on mind, be- 
ginners discovering that scholars were vital men 
with red blood in their veins exploring the mag- 
ical regions of still-undiscovered truth, while 
specialists were constantly reminded of the 
common underlying body of truth and so pre- 
vented from growing isolated, unsympathetic, 
and idiosyncranized. 

This was of the essence of the whole pro- 
gramme which President Wilson had been per- 
mitted to initiate and to bring so far toward 
success. And now the university was asked to 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 147 

abandon it for a million dollars! Mr. Wilson 
exclaimed : 

The whole Princeton idea is an organic idea, an idea 
of contact of mind with mind — no chasms, no divisions 
in life and organization — a grand brotherhood of intel- 
lectual endeavor, stimulating the younger, instructing 
and balancing the older man, giving the one an aspiration 
and the other a comprehension of what the whole under- 
taking is — of lifting, lifting, lifting the mind of successive 
generations from age to age! 

That is the enterprise of knowledge, an enterprise that 
is the common undertaking of all men who pray for the 
greater enlightenment of the ages to come. If you do 
anything to mar this process, this organic integration of 
the university, what have you done? You have destroyed 
the Princeton idea which for the time being has arrested 
the attention of the academic world. Is that good busi- 
ness? When we have leadership in our grasp, is it good 
business to retire from it? When the country is looking 
to us as men who prefer ideas even to money, are we going 
to withdraw and say, "After all, we find we were mis- 
taken: we prefer money to ideas?" 

This may be as good a point as any at which 
to make it clear that the anti-Wilson sentiment 
was far from general among the alumni; it was 



148 WOODROW WILSON 

practically confined to the cities of the East. 
In the Board of Trustees, fourteen out of the 
thirty took their stand against him ; the deciding 
few wavered. The fine body of faculty mem- 
bers engaged in graduate work were practically 
unanimous in their support of the president's 
sound, scholarly, and practical plans, and en- 
tirely unsympathetic with the ornate dreams of 
the dean. As for the students, never for a 
moment did he have reason to doubt their es- 
sential soundness; they were caught in the toils 
of a vicious system, but they furnished the best 
of material for the development of a true 
American university along democratic lines. 
Throughout the graduate school controversy 
they were ardent Wilson men, though, of course, 
powerless to influence the result. 

With the Proctor offer withdrawn, the original 
plan was reverted to for a modest graduate 
school beginning, financed with the Swann be- 
quest. And it was in such wise as this that the 
president spoke justifying his position: 

It is a matter of universal regret that anything should 
have occurred which seemed to show, on the part of 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 149 

the university authorities, a lack of appreciation of Mr. 
Proctor's generosity and love of the university. It is to 
be hoped that the mere progress of our plans will show that 
no purpose was entertained by any one which need have 
led to any misunderstanding. Our gratitude to Mr. 
Proctor on behalf of the university is not in any way 
diminished or clouded by his decision to withdraw the 
offer he so liberally made. 

The thought which constantly impresses and leads us 
at Princeton, and which I am sure prevails among the 
great body of her alumni, is that we are one and all of us 
trustees to carry out a great idea and strengthen a great 
tradition of national service. We are not at liberty to use 
Princeton for our private purposes or to adapt her in any 
way to our own use and pleasure. It is our bounden duty 
to make her more and more responsive to the intellectual 
and moral needs of a great nation. It is our duty at every 
point in our development to look from the present to the 
future, to see to it that Princeton adapts herself to a great 
national development, that her first thought shall be to 
serve the men who come to her in the true spirit of the age 
and in the true spirit of knowledge. We should be for- 
ever condemned in the public judgment and in our own 
conscience if we used Princeton for any private purpose 
whatever. It will be our pleasure, as it is our duty, to 
confirm the tradition which has made us proud of her in 
the past and put her at the service of those influential 



150 WOODROW WILSON 

generations of scholars and men of affairs who are to play 
their part in making the future of America. 



But the opposition was not to be met on any 
such ground of quiet argument and high appeal. 
Mr. Wilson never permitted himself to approach 
or suggest personalities (however besought by 
graduates in distant cities to "tell them all the 
truth"); the opposition betook itself to sheer 
slander and abuse. Much may be forgiven 
earnest men, but it is simply inexplicable that 
college trustees, professors, and alumni could 
have indulged in the vituperative bitterness that 
found its way into privately circulated pam- 
phlets and round-robins and into public print. 

The fact is that the discussion of the "quad" 
system and of the rights of a donor to dictate 
how his money should be used had revealed 
the existence of a bottomless chasm in the ways 
of thinking, in the attitude of spirit that charac- 
terized two sets of Princeton men. It was the 
chasm that divides democracy and aristocracy, 
respect for the rights of manhood and submis- 
sion to the rights of property. It was an in^ 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 151 

eradicable instinct in President Wilson and the 
men who supported him that the hfe of students 
must be made democratic; the opposition felt 
no indignation at the existence in college of those 
social distinctions which they believed must al- 
ways prevail out in the world. President Wil- 
son and his supporters could not brook the idea 
that a man of wealth should undertake to dic- 
tate the policy of a school professedly conducted 
by men who were giving their lives to the prob- 
lems of education. 

"I cannot accede," he wrote, "to the accept- 
ance of gifts upon terms which take the educa- 
tional policy of the university out of the hands of 
the trustees and faculty and permit it to be 
determined by those who give money." 

Those who were enthusiastic for a university 
in which social lines should be obliterated and a 
group of coordinate democracies set up were 
divided from those who were content to main- 
tain and even accentuate distinctions by a 
cleavage as deep as any that exists in the world 
to-day. No wonder that the partisans of the 
opposition, in the Board and out, looked on 



152 WOODROW WILSON 

Wilson as a dangerous man; no wonder that he, 
slowly aroused by their villification, began oc- 
casionally to unslip the leash of his tongue, 
denounce colleges and churches for yielding to 
*'the accursed domination of money," and make 
impassioned appeals for a declaration of college 
independence. When the going is rapid, Wilson 
isn't the man to bother about a shock-absorber. 
At Pittsburg, addressing alumni, he poured 
out all his soul : 

You can't spend four years at one of our modern uni- 
versities without getting in your thought the conviction 
which is most dangerous to America — namely, that you 
must treat with certain influences which now dominate in 
the commercial undertakings of the country. 

The great voice of America does not come from seats of 
learning. It comes in a murmur from the hills and woods 
and the farms and factories and the mills, rolling on and 
gaining volume until it comes to us from the homes of 
common men. Do these murmurs echo in the corridors 
of universities? I have not heard them. 

The universities would make men forget their common 
origins, forget their universal sympathies, and join a class 
— and no class ever can serve America. 

I have dedicated every power that there is within me 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 153 

to bring the colleges that I have anything to do with to an 
absolutely democratic regeneration in spirit, and I shall 
not be satisfied — and I hope you will not be — until 
America shall know that the men in the colleges are satu- 
rated with the same thought, the same sympathy, that 
pulses through the whole great body politic. 

I know that the colleges of this country must be recon- 
structed from top to bottom, and I know that America 
is going to demand it. While Princeton men pause and 
think, I hope — and the hope arises out of the great love 
I share with you all for our inimitable alma mater — I hope 
that they will think on these things, that they will forget 
tradition in the determination to see to it that the free 
air of America shall permeate every cranny of their 
college. 

Will America tolerate the seclusion of graduate stu- 
dents.? Will America tolerate the idea of having graduate 
students set apart? America will tolerate nothing except 
unpatronized endeavor. Seclude a man, separate him 
from the rough and tumble of college life, from all the 
contacts of every sort and condition of men, and you have 
done a thing which America will brand with its contempt- 
uous disapproval. 

To an utterance like that there could be no 
reply; in an issue thus clearly defined before the 
whole world (for the Pittsburg speech got into 



154 WOODROW WILSON 

the papers and all America applauded) no living 
board of college trustees would have dared sepa- 
rate itself from the bold speaker. 

No reply? No living men to take issue? Be- 
hold how the President of the Immortals jests 
with us: 

In the town of Salem, Mass., lived an old man 
named Isaac C. Wyman — so old that his father 
had fought at the battle of Princeton, January 
3, 1777. They were rich even then, the Wy- 
mans, for the father's father had given General 
Washington £40,000 for his army, as a yellow 
slip of paper signed by the Revolutionary com- 
mander still attests. Isaac had been graduated 
at the College of New Jersey one June day in 
1848. During the sixty-two years since that 
day he had never returned to Princeton. But 
now, the time having come to die, and he, being 
of sound and disposing mind, made his will, and 
paid the debt of nature. 

President Wilson's Pittsburg speech was made 
on April 17 (this was in 1910). A month and a 
day later. May 18, by the decease of Isaac C. 
W^yman, the Graduate College of Princeton 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 155 

University became the legatee of an estate 
estimated at more than three millions of dollars 
bequeathed in the trusteeship of John M. Ray- 
mond of Salem and Andrew F. West of Prince- 
ton. 

There is no quarreling with the dead. 

At the June trustee meeting the Proctor offer 
was renewed and accepted. The president 
made a polite announcement of his acquiescence 
in the situation created by the miraculous 
windfall; the gigantic new fund altered every- 
thing. The university architect was put to 
work on a scheme of magnificent proportions. 

Commencement was a season of careful ob- 
servance of all outward amenities. The pres- 
ident made the speech presenting M, Taylor 
Pyne, Esq., the leader of the opposition among 
the trustees, with a gold cup, celebrating the at- 
tainment of his twenty -fifth year as a trustee. 
He attended a dinner given by Dean West in 
honor of Mr. Proctor. All that a man forced to 
confess himself defeated by events could grace- 
fully do, he did. What it cost his soul no man 



156 WOODROW WILSON 

could guess. A moral defeat he had not suffered. 
The principle for which he had stood had not 
been disproved, discredited, or annulled; the 
gods had overwhelmed it, that was all. 

Of course, he was laughed at, sneered at even 
by certain alumni, called on to resign. If they 
had dared, the triumphant party would have 
dismissed him; they did not dare: Woodrow 
Wilson was too strong before the country. 
There was this fly in the ointment of their re- 
joicing: an alumni trustee was being elected this 
year as usual, and it was the turn of the West to 
name him. But Eastern anti-Wilsonists had 
put up a candidate and made a frenzied cam- 
paign for him. At Commencement the result 
was made known: the anti-W^ilson man, Mr. 
Joline, had been overwhelmingly beaten. But 
the president himself felt that his work at Prince- 
ton was done. He had come to that alternative 
of the Happy W^arrior; of one 

Who if he rise to station of command 
Rises by open means; and there will stand 
On honorable terms, or else retire, 
And in himself possess his own desire. 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 157 

He was to retire — but not to obscurity, even 
temporary. The country had not missed al- 
together what was going on at Princeton. The 
state had been watching him. And now there 
came rolHng up from the people, the people out- 
side of the colleges, the citizens for whom col- 
leges exist, a great shout that this man was the 
sort of man that ought to be leading the fight 
for their cause out in the world of real affairs. 
Politicians heard that call, and shrewdly joined 
it. September 15th, a New Jersey State Conven- 
tion — that of the Democratic party — in ses- 
sion at Trenton, nominated Woodrow Wilson 
for the Governorship. He was at Princeton 
when they brought him the news; he climbed 
into a motor-car, and in twenty minutes stood 
on the platform before a shouting throng and 
accepted their invitation. 

A week later Princeton University opened 
for a new term, with the resignation of its pres- 
ident in the hands of the trustees — who, in 
due time voted him all manner of compli- 
mentary resolutions, made him still another 
kind of Doctor, inexpressibly regretted his 



158 WOODROW WILSON 

resignation — and accepted it, on the part of a 
small majority with thanks unspoken, but in- 
finite in their sincerity. November 8th the peo- 
ple of New Jersey, by a great majority, made 
him Governor. 

They are fashioning at Princeton a splendid 
fabric of stone, which will dominate the land- 
scape for many miles. Three great fortunes go 
into it, refined culture planned it, and rare 
architectural skill is uprearing it. Nothing out- 
side of Oxford will excel it in dimensions, nothing 
anywhere match it in sumptuous luxury. No 
doubt it will be the beautiful home of successive 
generations of young gentlemen who will be a 
credit to our intellectual life. The clubs on 
Prospect Avenue still house lucky youths in 
delightful existence unthreatened now by an 
impracticable idealist. 

But somehow a spirit is departed that for a 
while moved like a refreshing breeze on campus 
and in hall. Because, for a while, Princeton 
promised to be something more than a college 
for rich men's sons. 



GRADUATE COLLEGE CONTEST 159 

In days to come, when the ivy is over the 
Graduate College and the clubs as it is now over 
Nassau, the most interesting tale that men will 
tell at Princeton will be the story of a battle — 
that was lost; and of a leader who was refused 
and sent away — only to become a captain in 
the broad field of an historic national struggle. 



CHAPTER X 

OUT OF PRINCETON INTO POLITICS 

THE state of New Jersey at the beginning 
of the year 1910 was in the case of 
many another commonwealth in this 
Union of States. It was in the grip of the 
pohticians and the corporations, and the good 
people resident within its borders had about as 
much voice in the management of their public 
affairs as they had in deciding the weather or 
determining the phases of the moon. For years 
the state government had been run by agents of 
"the interests" — for a time the Pennsylvania 
Railroad predominating, more recently a com- 
bination of electric light and power companies, 
gas companies, and trolley lines, controlled by 
the Prudential Insurance Company and the 
malodorous United Gas Improvement Company 
of Philadelphia. 

Laterly it was the Republican Organization 

160 



INTO POLITICS 161 

that had been in power at Trenton, but the 
system was really a bi-partisan one. The 
Republican bosses — Senator John Dryden, 
Senator John Kean, ex-Governor Franklin Mur- 
phy, ex-Governor Edward C. Stokes, and David 
P. Baird — had come to be known as the "Board 
of Guardians," in which the public service, rail- 
road, insurance, and other corporation interests 
were duly represented. The Democratic Or- 
ganization was the private property of James 
Smith, Jr., a politician who had made his way 
into the United States Senate in consequence of 
having delivered the vote of the Jersey delega- 
tion to Mr. Cleveland at the Democratic 
National Convention of 1892, and who had re- 
tired from that body under criticisms connected 
with certain scandals incidental to the framing 
of the Wilson tariff. Ex-Senator Smith is a 
polished man of affairs whose business interests 
are identical with those of his friends on the 
Republican "Board of Guardians." His chief 
lieutenant was James R. Nugent, a typical rep- 
resentative of the old-style, strong-arm methods 
in politics. "Bob" Davis, the thrifty boss of 



162 WOODROW WILSON 

Hudson County, sometimes rebelled against his 
feudal lord and sometimes played in with him, 
but between Smith and Davis, the organization 
through a dozen lean years had existed to garner 
the spoils of municipal jobs and contracts in 
Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken; to fill a few 
minority memberships on state commissions of 
one sort and another; and to furnish the Re- 
publican machine with needed help in time of 
danger. 

However, the great moral movement which 
during the last five years has been abroad in the 
land, had not left New Jersey unaware of its 
gathering power. The leaders of both parties 
were forced to heed it. In the Republican party 
Everett Colby, George L. Record, and others 
stirred up a dangerous enthusiasm among "new 
idea Republicans." Somehow, somewhere, by 
some one, there was suggested to Mr. Smith's 
organization a plan of getting aboard the re- 
form wagon and riding on it into power. The 
fight against privilege and the championship 
of democracy in college life captained by the 
president of Princeton University had attracted 



INTO POLITICS 163 

the attention of the state and now suggested 
him as a man who could lead a party to victory 
under the banner of political reform. President 
Wilson was a student of public affairs of author- 
ity throughout the country; he was an accom- 
plished and persuasive speaker; a man of lofty 
character and , winning personality. Indeed, 
from outside the state, from the press of many 
cities, had come the suggestion that the nation 
would be fortunate if it could place such a man 
as Wilson in the Presidential chair. 

It is easy enough to see how the idea of run- 
ning Wilson for Governor needed only present 
itself to the imagination of a shrewd boss to be- 
come immediately congenial. Mr. Smith had 
a son at Princeton and had on one or two oc- 
casions exchanged greetings with the head of the 
college, but there was no real acquaintance be- 
tween the two men, and the Democratic leader 
no doubt naturally imagined that a learned col- 
legian would be as putty in the hands of an ex- 
perienced politician — especially if his eyes were 
rose-spectacled by the promise of a nomination 
for President. The man was a hero for pro- 



164 WOODROW WILSON 

gressive, independent citizens everywhere and 
especially within the state where he was best 
known; a spontaneous popular feeling that he 
would make an ideal Governor had arisen; what 
could be better politics than to become sponsor 
of his nomination and use his popularity for a 
ride back to power? 

During the early summer of 1910 President 
Wilson was told by a number of his friends that 
he could probably have the Democratic nomina- 
tion for Governor if he desired it. These inti- 
mations became so numerous and so pointed and 
were accompanied by so many assurances of the 
benefit the party and the state would derive 
from his acceptance that Mr. Wilson was con- 
strained to lend them a favorable ear. His 
work at Princeton was apparently arrested — 
that he realized. 

And yet the prospective nominee was pro- 
foundly puzzled. While sentiment among the 
best class of voters throughout the state was 
strong, the practical overtures came from the 
organization headed by Smith. Mr. Wilson 
was perfectly aware of ex-Senator Smith's 



INTO POLITICS 165 

political character and history; he knew what 
the organization was. How could such a gang 
support him? What quid did they expect for 
their quo? Were they deceiving themselves as 
to their man? Did they fancy that his life- 
long detestation of corrupt politics was simply 
pose? Or were they merely willing to take him 
because they knew he was the only sure chance 
of party victory? Willing to have an incor- 
ruptible Governor if it were impossible otherwise 
to get a Democratic Governor? Did Smith 
regard the schoolmaster as a simple soul who 
would hand out corporation favors without 
knowing? Did he expect to get a United States 
Senatorship through the Democratic legislature 
which Wilson's popularity was likely to elect? 

On that point Mr. Wilson made specific 
inquiry of the gentlemen who came to him on 
their puzzling errand. He required their assur- 
ance that Mr. Smith would not seek the Senator- 
ship. "Were he to do so, while I was Governor," 
he told them, "' I should have to oppose him. He 
represents everything repugnant to my con- 
victions." They told him categorically that 



166 WOODROW WILSON 

Smith had no idea of going back to the Senate; 
that he was a man thought to be sick with a 
dangerous constitutional ailment and borne 
down by domestic bereavement and that he 
was definitely out of politics. Furthermore, 
they called his attention to the fact that the 
election laws of New Jersey called for a primary, 
in which the respective parties by popular vote 
selected their candidates for Senator. James 
Smith, Jr., would not enter that primary race. 
Nothing could be more convincing on that score. 

Talking afterward of his perplexity at this 
time. Governor Wilson said: 

"I was asked to allow myself to be nominated, 
and for a long time it was impossible for me to 
understand why I had been asked. The gentle- 
men who wanted to nominate me were going 
outside the ranks of recognized politicians and 
picking out a man whom they knew would be 
regarded as an absolutely independent person 
and whom I thought they knew was an abso- 
lutely independent person. I tried to form a 
working theory as to why they should do it. I 
asked very direct and impertinent questions of 



INTO POLITICS 167 

some of the gentlemen as to why they wanted 
me to make the run. They didn't give me any 
very satisfactory explanation, so I had to work 
one out for myself. I concluded on the whole 
that these gentlemen had been driven to recog- 
nize that a new day had come in American 
politics, and that they would have to conduct 
themselves henceforth after a new fashion. 
Moreover, there were certain obvious practical 
advantages to be gained by the old-time man- 
agers. Whether they could control the Gover- 
nor or not, a Democratic victory would restore 
their local prestige and give them control of a 
score of things in which the Governor could not 
command them, even if he wished. It was one 
thing to put a Governor in and a legislature; it 
was another to control their counties and mu- 
nicipalities." 

The sequel will show how accurate was this 
theory. 

On Tuesday, July 12, 1910, a number of 
gentlemen gathered in a private room of the 
Laywers' Club, 120 Broadway, New York, to 
inquire of Mr. Wilson whether he would allow 



168 WOODROW WILSON 

his name to be presented to the New Jersey 
Democratic State Convention. At that meet- 
ing were present Robert S. Hudspeth, national 
committeeman for New Jersey; James R. Nu- 
gent, state chairman; Eugene F. Kinkead, Con- 
gressman; Richard V. Lindabury, George Har- 
vey, and Milan Ross. But one practical inquiry 
was made of Mr. Wilson; it was voiced by Mr. 
Hudspeth, and was in substance this: 

** Doctor Wilson, there have been some politi- 
cal reformers who, after they have been elected 
to office as candidates of one party or the other, 
have shut the doors in the face of the Organiza- 
tion leaders, refusing even to listen to them. Is 
it your idea that a Governor must refuse to 
acknowledge his party organization?" 

"Not at all," Mr. Wilson repUed. ''I have 
always been a believer in party organizations. 
If I were elected Governor I should be very glad 
to consult with the leaders of the Democratic 
Organization. I should refuse to listen to no 
man, but I should be especially glad to hear and 
duly consider the suggestions of the leaders of 
my party. If, on my own idependent in vest i- 



INTO POLITICS 169 

gation, I found that recommendations for ap- 
pointment made to me by the Organization 
leaders named the best possible men, I should 
naturally prefer, other things being equal, to 
appoint them, as the men pointed out by the 
combined counsels of the party." 

On July 15th, Mr. Wilson issued a public 
statement in which he said that if it were the 
wish ''of a decided majority of the thoughtful 
Democrats of the state" that he should be their 
candidate for Governor, he would accept the 
nomination. 

The announcement caused a sensation. It 
was received with enthusiasm by many men of 
both parties, yet there were not lacking those 
who were so suspicious of Smith and his associ- 
ate bosses that they could not believe the 
nomination was to be given Mr. Wilson without 
pledges from him. Again, some of the best and 
most intelligent men of the Democratic party, 
while they did not doubt the integrity of the pro- 
posed nominee, did fear that his inexperience in 
practical politics would make him an easy in- 
strument of the gang. Mr. Wilson had been 



170 WOODROW WILSON 

assured that only his consent was necessary for 
his unchallenged nomination, but in fact oppo- 
sition to it at once arose and continued until 
the convention balloted. Three other Demo- 
crats — Frank S. Katzenbach, George S. Sil- 
zer, and H. Otto Wittpen — immediately en- 
tered the ring. Wittpen was the successful 
Mayor of Jersey City and the sworn foe of 
'*Bob" Davis; Davis, though lately he had 
quarreled with Smith, was now reconciled, and 
threw his Jersey City organization for Wilson's 
candidacy. 

After issuing his statement, Mr. Wilson went 
to the little town of Lyme, Conn., where he has 
been in the habit of spending his summers, and 
— spent his summer. He moved not one of his 
ten fingers in behalf of the nomination. Cer- 
tain other people, however, were moving every 
thing movable to that end. The fact that the 
Smith crowd was advocating him puzzled many 
who otherwise would have been his foremost sup- 
porters. It was only (as Mr. Wilson af^^erward 
learned to his amazement) by sharp dxagooning 
that a majority sufiicient to make him the choice 



INTO POLITICS 171 

was seated in the Trenton Convention on Sep- 
tember 15th. 

The speech made in that body by Clarence 
Cole, formally putting Princeton's president in 
nomination, was interrupted by jeers, cat-calls, 
and sarcastic questions. A few remarks made 
by Mr. Smith were, however, closely listened to. 
The Big Boss said that he had no personal ac- 
quaintance with Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson and 
he did not move in the same world. He had 
never conversed with him. Had conditions 
been different, he should have preferred a can- 
didate identified with the Organization. But it 
was necessary to find a man who could be elected. 
Mr. Wilson was a Democrat and he could be 
elected; he knew nobody else who for a certainty 
could be. Therefore he was for Wilson, who 
had consented to accept a nomination without 
any private obligations or undertakings what- 
ever — he was for him on the ground that it was 
time New Jersey had a Democratic Governor. 

These were sagacious sentences — and had 
the incidental merit of telling the truth. It is 
imdeiiiable that Smith organized the Wilson 



172 WOODROW WILSON 

candidacy; it is the curious fact, however, that 
he could insure its success only by publicly 
separating himself from it as far as he could. 

On the first ballot, 709 votes being necessary 
to a choice, Woodrow Wilson received 749 
and was declared the nominee for Governor. 
Hastily summoned from Princeton, eleven miles 
away, he appeared on the platform and made a 
speech of acceptance so ringing in its assertion 
of independence and so trumpet-toned in its 
utterance of the principles of progressive democ- 
racy that the convention was fairly carried off 
its feet. Yew of the delegates had ever seen or 
heard Mr. Wilson. Had he made that speech 
before the ballot — there would have been no 
ballot. Having made it, he became the candi- 
date of a united and enthusiastic party. 

The language in which Mr. Wilson made clear 
to the convention the circumstances under which 
he was accepting the nomination was as follows : 

I did not seek this nomination. I have made no pledge 
and have given no promise. Still more, not only was no 
promise asked, but as far as I know, none was desired. 
If elected, as I expect to l)e, I am left absolutely free to 



INTO POLITICS 173 

serve you with all singleness of purpose. It is a new era 
when these things can be said. 

In the first speech of his campaign, at Jersey 
City, September 28th, the candidate said: 

Some gentlemen on this platform can tell you more 
specifically than I can that I did not seek the nomination 
as Governor. They were generous enough to offer it to 
me, and because they offered it to me they were generous 
enough to let me understand that I was under no obliga- 
tion to any individual or group of individuals. 

Now this story of Mr. Wilson's nomination is 
worth telling in some detail because, in the first 
place, it is a funny story, in the light of its se- 
quel; and because, in the second place, it has to 
do with the charge of ''ingratitude" — the 
gravest brought against New Jersey's Governor. 
"What do you think of Woodrow Wilson?" a 
New York reporter asked Mr. Richard Croker 
on the latest of those brief visits which the ex- 
Tammany chieftain deigns occasionally to pay 
to the land and city now bereft of his political 
leadership. "Nothing to say," replied Mr. 
Croker. After a few pulls at his cigar, however, 



174 WOODROW WILSON 

he brought out: "An mgrate is no good in 
poHtics." 

Which is sound pohtical sagacity. Is Wilson 
an ingrate? 

After a few speeches in which it was apparent 
that the nominee had a Kttle difficulty in bring- 
ing himself to ask anybody to vote for him, 
Mr. Wilson developed unusual power as a cam- 
paigner. The speeches required of a candidate 
are not of the nature of those in which a col- 
lege president or a polished occasional orator is 
practised, but this candidate had things to say 
on which his convictions were so strong and his 
sense of their importance so great that he soon 
learned language that caught the ear and won 
the warm attention of the great body of the 
plain voters of New Jersey. He talked to them 
of the need of dragging public business out of 
private rooms where secret interests and pro- 
fessional political jobbers conspire, into the open 
air where all might see what is being done; of the 
need of new political machinery that the people 
might resume the control of their own affairs; 
he talked of the vast social and industrial 



INTO POLITICS 175 

changes of the past twenty years, making neces- 
sary the renovation of all our old social and in- 
dustrial ideas; of the need of new relations be- 
tween workingmen and their employers, now 
that these are days of great corporations; of the 
need of regulating strictly those corporations; 
talked simply, straightforwardly, of all manner 
of specific public things in a way that brought 
them home to the individual voter with a new 
sense of his own personal concern in them and 
awakened in him a new realization of his duty, 
his power, and his opportunity. He not only 
did this; he lifted political discussion to a new 
plane, till at every meeting the audience was 
thrilled with the consciousness that the problems 
of to-day are gigantic, critical, big with the pur- 
poses of Providence, as they heard this man pic- 
ture them on the broad background of history, 
in the inspiration of a soul aflame with love of 
common humanity and faith in its progress 
toward splendid futures. 

One incident of the campaign was the candi- 
date's reply to a list of questions, presumed to be 
embarrassing, asked him in an open letter by a 



176 WOODROW WILSON 

Progressive Republican, Mr. George L. Record. 
Mr. Record put into careful form nineteen 
queries requiring Mr. Wilson to declare himself 
on such subjects as a public service commission 
with power to fix rates; the physical valuation of 
public service corporation properties; direct 
primaries; popular election of United States 
Senators; ballot reform; corrupt practices legis- 
lation; employers' liability for workingmen's in- 
juries; and finally his own opinion of the Demo- 
cratic bosses — namely, Smith, Nugent, and Davis. 
With instant readiness, with audacious glee, 
Mr. Wilson gave his answers: he accepted the 
whole Progressive Republican programme and 
asked for more; no Republican could satisfy a 
Progressive Democrat's appetite for reform. As 
for Smith, Nugent, and Davis, he would join 
anybody in denouncing them ; they differed from 
Baird, Kean, Stokes, and Murphy in this, that 
the latter "are in control of the government of 
the state, while the others are not, and cannot he 
if the present Democratic ticket is elected,'' Mr. 
Wilson went farther; he asked himself a twen- 
tieth question which Mr. Record had been too 



INTO POLITICS 177 

polite to ask: What would be his relations 
with those men if elected Governor? "I shall 
always welcome advice and suggestions from 
any citizen, whether boss, leader. Organization 
man, or plain citizen, but all suggestions and 
advice will be considered on their merits. I 
should deem myself forever disgraced should I, 
in even the slightest degree, cooperate in any 
such system or any such transactions as 'the 
boss system' describes." 

Election day was November 8th. On that 
day the people of New Jersey, for many years 
a Republican state, chose Woodrow Wilson for 
Governor by a plurality of 49,150. Two years 
before, Taft had carried the state by a plurality 
of 82,000. Wilson had changed the political 
mind of 66,000 out of 433,000 voters. You will 
hunt hard to find the like of that in American 
politics. At the same ratio, if the new Democratic 
National Convention were to nominate him for the 
Presidency, Wilson would transform Taffs 1908 
plurality of 1,270,000 — that marvelous, almost 
unparalleled plurality — into a Democratic tri- 
umph by 1,630,000 popular votes. 



178 WOODROW WILSON 

On the same day, the majority of those Dem- 
ocrats who took the trouble to mark their 
ballots in this particular, selected James E. 
Martine as their choice for United States 
Senator. The total Democratic vote for Sena- 
tor was only 73,000. Martine received 54,000. 
Nobody voted for James Smith, Jr. 

James E. Martine was an honest and faith- 
ful Democrat, with radical views ; as genial and 
good-hearted a man as ever breathed — but 
scarcely a man that would have been chosen de- 
liberately for the dignities of membership in the 
august body that sits in the northern end of the 
National Capitol. Regularly, for years, he had 
been put up as candidate for any old oflSce to 
which there was no hope of election. Once he had 
run for sheriff; twice he had run for Congress; 
four times for the assembly; four times for the 
State Senate. Defeat had ever been his cheer- 
fully accepted portion. It was a well-estab- 
lished rule that Martine was always to run — 
never to reach anything. Now, to general 
astonishment, Wilson's popularity had given 
Democrats a majority on joint ballot of the two 



INTO POLITICS 179 

houses of the legislature; a successor was to be 
elected to United States Senator John Kean, 
and Martine had been permitted to lead in the 
primary ! 

Ten days after the election James Smith, Jr., 
called on Governor-elect Wilson at his home in 
Princeton. The ex-Senator is a gentleman of 
taste, of Chesterfieldian manner and delightful 
conversation, and his congratulations, we may 
depend upon it, were gracefully phrased. 
Equally graceful was his modest confession that 
he found his health now greatly bettered, and 
his intimation that he now indeed felt justified 
in taking into serious consideration the idea of 
asking reelection to the United States Senate. 

Governor-elect Wilson, when he had satisfied 
himself that he heard aright, expressed the very 
great astonishment which he felt; he then said 
to Mr. Smith that he regarded the idea as im- 
possible, and he begged him to abandon it forth- 
with. Followed a long conversation, in which 
Smith sought to justify his political past, while 
the Governor-elect made more and more explicit 
his warning that he would never permit the 



180 WOODROW WILSON 

election. The ex-Senator turned the talk on 
Martine's qualifications, or lack of them — 
which Mr. Wilson refused to discuss. The issue 
was not Martine, but the party's faith. The 
primary had elected Martine, and there was 
nothing for the legislature to do but ratify that 
election. 

*'The primary was a joke," said Smith 
**It was very far from a joke," rejoined the 
Governor-elect. ''But assume that it was. 
Then the way to save it from being a joke here- 
after is to take it seriously now. It is going to 
be taken seriously, and there will be no more 
jokes. The question who is to enjoy one term 
in the Senate is of small consequence compared 
with the question whether the people of New 
Jersey are to gain the right to choose their own 
Senators forever." 

Smith's candidacy was now made publicly 
known, and the party sharply divided, the Or- 
ganization declaring its purpose and its abilit}^ 
to carry the legislature for him, and the decent 
rank and file denouncing the attempt to steal a 
Senatorship for a discredited politician who 



INTO POLITICS 181 

dared not run in the primary. The greatest 
eagerness was shown as to the attitude of 
Governor-elect Wilson. He, however, refrained, 
for a little while, from taking either side pub- 
licly, hoping his public interference would not 
be necessary. Privately, he sent many men of 
influence to Smith to urge him not to try the 
race. These measures availed nothing. 

As a last effort to save Mr. Smith from the 
humiliation he was determined should overtake 
him if he persisted, Mr. Wilson called on Mr. 
Smith by appointment at his house in Newark. 
It was in the late afternoon of Tuesday, Decem- 
ber 6th. The Governor-elect said he had come to 
say that, although he had as yet taken no public 
stand, it was his intention, unless Mr. Smith 
withdrew from the Senatorial contest, to an- 
nounce his opposition to him. 

"Will you be content in having thus publicly 
announced your opposition? " asked the aspirant. 

"No. I shall actively oppose you with every 
honorable means in my power," replied the 
Governor-elect. 

"Does that mean that you will employ the 



18£ WOODROW WILSON 

state patronage against me?" inquired Mr. 
Smith. 

"No," answered Wilson. "I should not re- 
gard that as an honorable means. Besides, that 
will not be necessary." 

The Governor-elect then laid down this ulti- 
matum: 

"Unless I hear from you, by or before the 
last mail delivery on Thursday night, that you 
abandon this ambition, I shall announce my op- 
position to you on Friday morning." 

The last mail Thursday night brought no 
message from Smith, and Mr. Wilson by tele- 
graph released to the morning newspapers a 
statement he had prepared denouncing the 
Smith candidacy. Half an hour later came a 
special delivery letter from Smith asking for a 
few days' delay. The denunciation had gone 
out. 

It was a bitter fight. The Governor did not 
wait for the assembling of the legislature; he 
appeared before large audiences in the chief 
cities — and, making a clear statement of the 
case, asked the people to see to it that their rep- 



INTO POLITICS 183 

resentatives voted right. Among the legisla 
tors there was panic; none of them had ever 
heard of such a thing as this smiHng defiance, by 
a mere novice in the pohtical field, of a boss who 
had ruled twenty years. Not all of them had 
instant faith in the outcome. But there never 
was any doubt about the result. As Governor 
Wilson afterward told the story, he brought no 
pressure to bear upon the wavering members of 
the legislature. He merely told them to follow 
their consciences, and tried to assure them that 
they would suffer no harm if they did so. He 
said to them: 

''Do not allow yourselves to be dismayed. 
You see where the machine is entrenched, and 
it looks like a real fortress. It looks as if real 
men were inside, as if they had real guns. Go 
and touch it. It is a house of cards. Those 
are imitation generals. Those are playthings 
that look like guns. Go and put your shoulder 
against the thing and it collapses." 

They took heart and put their shoulders 
against it, and it collapsed. 

On January 28th the New Jersey Legislature 



184 WOODROW WILSON 

elected James E. Marline to the United States 
Senate, giving him forty votes. The Organiza- 
tion mustered four for Smith. 

Such is the tale of Woodrow Wilson's '* in- 
gratitude." 

The most moderate and charitable account of 
the matter that any way reaches its pith is that 
which Wilson himself once gave: 

"They did not believe that I meant what 1 
said, and I did believe that they meant what 
they said." In their sophistication, they had 
gold-bricked somebody, certainly, but not the 
schoolmaster nor the people of New Jersey. 
They had digged a pit and fallen into the midst 
of it themselves. For the intended victim to 
escape was, of course, rank ingratitude! 



CHAPTER XI 

ONE YEAR OF A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 

THE platform upon which Governor Wil- 
son had been elected had promised four 
principal things — which probably not 
a man in the convention that adopted it ex- 
pected to see realized : the direct primary, a cor- 
rupt practices election law, a public service 
commission with power to fix rates, and an em- 
ployers' liability and workingmen's compensation 
law. The Governor's inaugural address — a re- 
markable document, vibrant with the spirit and 
the consciousness of a new age, new alike in poli- 
tics and in the very elements of social and indus- 
trial life — made it clear that he regarded the plat- 
form promises as binding. He spoke of them, 
and of a dozen kindred steps of enlightened re- 
form, with the blithe confidence of a captain who 
gives the word of advance to an assured and 
easy victory: 

185 



186 WOODROW WILSON 

It is not the foolish ardor of too sanguine or too radical 
reform that I urge upon you, but merely the tasks that 
are evident and pressing, the things we have knowledge 
and guidance enough to do; and to do with confidence and 
energy. I merely point out the present business of prog- 
ress and serviceable government, the next stage on the 
journey of duty. The path is as inviting as it is plain. 
Shall we hesitate to tread it? I look forward with genuine 
pleasure to the prospect of being your comrade upon it. 

The new Governor of New Jersey had little 
respect for the doctrine of ''the three coordinate 
branches, as it had been pedantically exagger- 
ated in practice." His study of the English 
parliamentary system had long ago directed his 
attention to the advantages of having the exec- 
utive closely associated in counsel with the leg- 
islature. His investigation of the American 
congressional system had confirmed him in the 
opinion that the attempt to maintain in pedantic 
precision the classic theory of separation, tended 
to divide and destroy responsibility, render 
official leadership impossible, and make a mud- 
dle where ought to be a clear-headed, decisive 
government. How often an executive of one 
party and a legislature of another completely 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 187 

waste a term of office, unable to do anything but 
play politics ! It ought to be impossible to have 
an executive administration trying to carry on 
the government without the backing of a legis- 
lature of the same political complexion. It 
ought to be impossible to have a legislature in 
which the executive administration cannot sug- 
gest legislation. 

It is not necessary here to go farther into Mr. 
Wilson's ideas of responsible government (he 
believes that the American plan is capable of 
natural improvement) , except to remark that he 
attributes the up-growth of the boss system, 
with its extra-legal, extra-official leaders, largely 
to the absence of constitutional provision for 
official leaders, and to add that he had deter- 
mined to be, as Governor,, an official leader — 
the chief of his party in the state, the party put 
into power by an overwhelming vote of the 
people — the leader, therefore, responsible not 
only for administering the routine business of 
the Governor's office, but for seeing that the 
policies endorsed in the party platform on which 
he had been elected were embodied in legis- 



188 WOODROW WILSON 

lation. During the campaign he had expHcitly 
requested that no man vote for him who did not 
want him to be the party leader. He had warned 
the electorate of the state that if elected he 
meant to be an "unconstitutional Governor," 
as the constitution was instantly interpreted to 
forbid his taking part in legislation. And the 
electorate had given him a majority of fifty 
thousand. 

It was not idly, therefore, that the Governor's 
inaugural bugle-call summoning the legislators 
to enter upon the path of progress ended with 
the jubilant note of pleasure at the prospect of 
being their "comrade" upon it. 

What was the situation that confronted this 
hopeful Governor? 

His party had a majority on joint ballot of the 
legislature; but the Senate, without whose con- 
currence no bill could become law, stood Repub- 
lican 12 to 9. Democrats were in a majority of 
42 to 18 in the Assembly, but many of the party's 
representatives were connected with the old 
Organization and resentful of the college pres- 
ident's advent into pohtics. The Governor's 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 189 

triumph in seating Mr. Martine in the United 
States Senate over ex-Senator Smith's candi- 
dacy had not ended the war between him and the 
old Organization. It had given him prestige, 
it had heartened the friends of good govern- 
ment; but it had even more savagely embittered 
the old leaders and engendered sullenness among 
their still faithful followers. ''We gave him the 
Senatorship," they said among themselves, "but 
that is the end; we've done enough; if he asks 
for more, he'll find out who is running the state 
of New Jersey." The state of New Jersey had 
been ''run" for years by the allied corporation 
interests. They might put up with the loss of 
a Senator, but legislation that proposed to fas- 
ten a workingmen's compensation liability upon 
them; put them, their books, and the rates they 
charged, under the control of the people; and 
that, above all, proposed to destroy the boss 
system, through which they held their dom- 
ination of the State House — such things simply 
could not and should not be. If anywhere in 
the Union the beautiful theories of representa- 
tive government met the ugly realities of actual 



190 WOODROW WILSON 

politics, they met them in the corporation-ruled 
state of New Jersey. What mattered the 
wishes of a majority of fifty thousand voters to a 
legislature two thirds of whose members were 
under obligations to one or the other of the or- 
ganizations they were asked to destroy? 

The way in which a situation so discouraging 
was forced to yield the surprising results it did 
yield is full of promise to men of hope. 

Governor Wilson relied from the start on the 
merits of the bills, on public sentiment in favor 
of them, and on his power to force the open dis- 
cussion of them. He would not permit them to 
be done for in secret conferences ; there should be 
public debate; he would make his own argu- 
ments for the bills so that all the state should 
hear him, and he would compel the opponents 
to give the reasons of their opposition publicly. 
The doors of his office stood always open, and 
he encouraged Senators and Assemblymen to 
make it a habit to come to see him and talk 
things over — famiharly, but never secretly. 
Those who did not come, he sent for, on one 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 191 

pretext or another, and the matter of the bills 
naturally came up. He told them that he had 
no patronage to dispose of, no promises to make, 
and no warnings to issue, but he should like to 
have them consider the bills on their merits, and 
let him know where they stood. 

Heretofore Republican Governors had con- 
sulted Republican members, and Democratic 
Governors had consulted Democratic members. 
Wilson consulted members of both parties. He 
talked to them all alike of the good of the com- 
monwealth; to Democrats he added arguments 
based on the platform promises. He made it 
clear that he considered himself chosen party 
leader, but he gave no orders — he would not be 
a boss; though he might be much bold to enjoin, 
yet he rather besought, with argument, with 
appeals to patriotism, state pride and party 
loyalty, with the simple, cheerful assumption 
that they were all agreed on essentials (hard 
they found it to deny that smiling assumption !) 
and need discuss only incidental details. The 
nearest that he ever came to a threat was in the 
suggestion to a few stubborn opponents that 



192 WOODROW WILSON 

they debate the question with him in pubHc in 
their own districts. From time to time the 
Governor issued pubhe statements regarding 
his measures; in one he expressed the fear that 
he might have to name the men who were pre- 
paring to be faithless to the platform promises 
and to betray the people. He never had to do 
this; when it came to a vote, as we shall see, 
there was nobody to name worth naming. 

On the opening of the legislature, January 
10, 1911, it was with difficulty that sponsors 
could be found to introduce the Governor's 
bills. Few believed that a single one of them 
could be forced through before the end of the 
session. "Very well, then, we shall have to 
have a special session to do it," was Governor 
Wilson's undismayed reply. *' However, let us 
hope that won't be necessary." 

First in order came up the Primary Elections 
Bill, to which an Assemblyman from Monmouth 
County had allowed his name to be given: the 
Geran Bill. 

This revolutionary piece of legislation con- 




S b 



GC 



<; 1-5 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 193 

templated the turning over of both, or all, 
political organizations to the people; conven- 
tions, so easily manipulated by nominating 
bosses, were done away with. All candidates 
for office from that of constable to President 
were to be nominated directly by ballot of the 
people; all party officers, committeemen, dele- 
gates to national conventions, and the like, were 
to be so elected by popular ballot, and the 
primary elections at which all this was to be 
done were to be conducted by the state under 
strict laws, the election officers being chosen 
from citizens who have passed special civil 
service examinations. The respective party 
platforms were to be written by the party's 
candidates for the legislature, meeting toge'.her 
with the state committee — the men who, if 
elected, were themselves to carry out the plat- 
form promises. 

To those who understand the significance of 
the great movement for the resumption by the 
people of the direct powers of government, it 
would have been sufficiently astonishing that a 
Governor of a state like New Jersey should have 



194 WOODROW WILSON 

thought it worth while to make to his legislature 
such an audacious proposal as the direct pri- 
mary, with popular selection of United States 
Senators, popular nomination of Presidential 
candidates, and popular choice of party officers. 
This meant the killing of the bosses ; it meant the 
extinction of corporation-controlled organiza- 
tions; it meant everything that New Jersey had 
never had and that the professional politicians 
and the big business interests could never permit 
it to have. 

No wonder there was a battle royal! 

Jame^ R. Nugent was in active direction of 
the opposition. Ex-Senator Smith's relation, 
he urged the "ingrate" argument; Wilson knew 
no honor and would knife the men who assisted 
him; state chairman, he was officially in com- 
mand of the party Organization, and could 
promise and threaten with the prestige of fifteen 
long years of almost unopposed party suprem- 
acy against this new Governor's bare month of 
troubled experience. 

Nugent easily arranged a coalition with the 
Republicans. Their Organization was equally 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 195 

threatened, and far greater than the fall of the 
minority party bosses would be that of the Re- 
publican *' Board of Guardians" who had for 
years "bossed" the majority party in the state. 
If the Republican majority still in control of 
the Senate stood pat, the Geran Bill would fail 
there; but Nugent wanted more: he wanted the 
Democratic lower chamber to repudiate the 
Governor's plan. He was so confident that this 
could be managed that he arranged for a con- 
ference on the bill as a preliminary test. 

It was a fatal error. 

The Governor heard of the conference, and 
genially suggested that he be invited. It was 
unprecedented for a Governor to attend a legis- 
lative caucus, but it would have been awkward 
to have declined to invite him if he wanted to 
come. So he went. 

The gathering was in the Supreme Court 
room, on the second floor of the State House. 
One Assemblyman, Martin, challenged the 
Governor's intervention; he had no constitu- 
tional right to interfere in legislation; had it not 
been written by them of old time that the ex- 



196 WOODROW WILSON 

ecutive and legislative branches must be kept 
sacredly apart? The Governor replied by draw- 
ing from his pocket the Legislative Manual and 
reading a clause of the constitution which directed 
the Governor of New Jersey to communicate 
with the legislature at such times as he might 
deem necessary, and to recommend such meas- 
ures as he might deem expedient. He was there, 
he continued, in pursuance of a constitutional 
duty, to recommend a measure of that character. 
In noble fashion did he recommend it. That 
conference lasted four and a half hours; for 
three hours of it Mr. Wilson was on his feet, 
first expounding the bill, clause by clause; 
answering all queries and replying to all objec- 
tions out of a knowledge not only of the ex- 
perience of other states but of the practical 
workings of politics, that greatly surprised his 
audience. One by one he met and silenced all 
critics. Then, looking about upon them, he 
began what will always remain one of the notable 
speeches of his career, a speech which no man 
who was present will ever forget. They were 
Democrats, and he spoke to them as such. This 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 197 

he told them, was no attempt to destroy the 
party; it was a plan to revitahze it and arm it 
for the war to which the swelhng voice of a 
people called it in an hour of palpitant expec- 
tancy. With an onrush of words white-hot 
with speed and suppressed emotion, he dis- 
played before them the higher view of political 
duty, and expanded the ground of his hope for 
the future of the Democratic party as a servant 
of the people. 

One repeats only what the attendants at this 
remarkable meeting unite in testifying when he 
says that they came downstairs not knowing 
whether more amazed by the force of logic that 
had fairly won them over, or moved by the in- 
spiring appeal to which they had listened The 
conference, called to refuse the Geran Bill, voted 
to make it a party measure. 

A Republican caucus was proposed to insure 
party unanimity against the bill, but so many 
Republican members refused in advance to be 
bound, that the plan was abandoned. The 
opposition had hoped that the Senate committee 
on elections would refuse to report the bill out, 



198 WOODROW WILSON 

but to this Senator Bradley, Republican, chair- 
man of the committee, declined to be a party. 
Senator Bradley had for several sessions been 
chairman of the joint committee on appropri- 
ations, and though the Democrats now controlled 
this committee. Governor Wilson had asked that 
Mr. Bradley, because of his long experience, be 
retained in its chairmanship. Doubtless this 
had nothing to do with Mr. Bradley's refusal to 
bury the Geran Bill. Doubtless the straight- 
forward Governor had had no thought of reci- 
procity. But the circumstance is interesting. 

The Senate elections committee did hold a 
public hearing, aranged by the opposition. It 
was a melancholy alBfair, from their standpoint; 
the speakers who were to demolish the bill never 
came, while a battery of able, and by now en- 
thusiastic, cannoneers riddled the pretensions 
of the enemy. It is a pity that the scathing 
sarcasm drawled from the scornful lips of 
Joseph Noonan, whose native Irish wit has not 
been spoiled by his Oxford education, was not 
stenographically reported. Traditions of its ef- 
fectiveness still hang about that Senate chamber. 



A PROGRESSI\^ GOVERNOR 199 

Among the expected lights who failed to come 
and scintillate for the Senate committee and the 
public was Mr. John William Griggs, Mc- 
Kinley's Attorney-General, and Governor of the 
state during the palmiest days of unrebuked 
misrule. Mr. Griggs's part in the world to-day 
is to bewail, with a heart of infinite sorrow, the 
tendency of a lawless generation to depart from 
the ancient landmarks of established order 
recommended by the prescription of immemorial 
usage, and certified by the sanction of many 
years of Republican prosperity. Governor Wil- 
son informed the Senators that if Mr. Griggs 
appeared, he would come himself and make a 
few remarks suggested by the former Attorney- 
General's speech. It would have been a great 
debate had it ever come off. The Governor 
waited in his office, but Mr. Griggs never came. 
The total of the opposition was represented by 
James Smith, Jr's., private secretary, who, after 
some desultory vaporings, sent word to his chief 
that open opposition to the Geran Bill was futile. 

So now was secret opposition. Nugent still 
hung about Trenton. One day he went into 



200 WOODROW WILSON 

the Governor's office, at the Governor's request, 
to "talk things over." 

Nugent very quickly lost his temper. 

**I know you think you've got the votes," he 
exclaimed. "I don't know how you got them." 

"What do you mean?" queried the Governor, 
sharply. 

"It's the talk of the State House that you got 
them by patronage." 

"Good afternoon, Mr. Nugent," said Gov- 
ernor Wilson, pointing to the door. 

"You're no gentleman," shouted the dis- 
comfited boss. 

"You're no judge," rephed Mr. Wilson, his 
finger continuing to indicate the exit. 

Let us finish with a disagreeable subject of 
some slight interest in a picture of Jersey pol- 
itics. Nugent crept away. Six months later 
he came again into the prominence of his kind. 
Still state chairman, he was giving a dinner to a 
small but convivial party at "Scotty's," a 
restaurant at Avon, on the Jersey coast. A 
party of oflficers of the New Jersey National 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 201 

Guard then in camp at Sea Girt, near by, was 
seated at an adjoining table. 

Nugent sent wine to the officers' table and 
asked them to join his own party in a toast. 
The diners at both tables arose. "I give you," 
cried Nugent, ''the Governor of the State of 
New Jersey" — all glasses were raised; Nugent 
finished — "a liar and an ingrate!" 

The diners stood a moment stupefied. *'Do 
I drink alone .^" shouted the host. 

He did drink alone. The glasses were set 
down untouched; some of the officers indig- 
nantly threw out their wine on the floor. Then 
all dispersed, and Nugent was left alone. 

The following day a majority of the members 
of the state committee signed a call for a meet- 
ing to elect a new chairman. The meeting 
was held a few days later at the Coleman 
House, Asbury Park. A little strong-arm work 
was indulged in, in Nugent's behalf, by a 
gang headed by Charlie Bell, a wine tout, 
but the Newark man was duly deposed, and a 
successor elected in the person of Edward W. 
Grosscup, a member of the Organization w^ho 



202 WOODROW WILSON 

had come to be a supporter and an admirer of 
the Governor. 

The Geran Bill came to its passage in the 
Assembly and went through with one third more 
votes than it needed. The Republican Senate 
accepted and passed it without a struggle. 

The whole legislative programme followed. 
To-day, Jersey has the most advanced and best 
working primary election law in the Union. It 
has a corrupt practices law of the severest kind. 
Betting on elections is forbidden. Treating by 
candidates is forbidden. All campaign ex- 
penses must be published; corporations may not 
contribute; the maximum amount allowed to be 
spent by candidates for any office is fixed by 
law. 

New Jersey to-day has a public utilities com- 
mission with powcT to appraise property, fix 
rates, forbid discriminations, regulate finances, 
control all sales, mortgages, and leases in the 
case of all railroads, steam and electric, in the 
case of express companies, of canal, subway, pipe 
line, gas, electric llglit, heat, power, water, oil. 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 203 

sewer, telegraph, telephone companies, systems, 
plants, or equipments for public use. This com- 
mission's orders as to rates go into effect im- 
mediately or, if they are cuts, at the end of 
twenty days' notice. To-day, New Jersey has 
an employers' liability law which gives an in- 
jured employee immediate automatic compen- 
sation paid by the employer. The working- 
man, may, however, sue for damages, if he pre- 
fers to take his chances before a jury. The state 
has to-day a provision for the adoption by such 
cities and towns as may desire it, of the com- 
mission form of government on the Des Moines 
plan, with the initiative and referendum and re- 
call. Under this law, Trenton, the capital, and 
eight other Jersey cities and towns are trying 
scientific municipal government. Governor Wil- 
son has spoken in many places in advocacy of 
the plan. 

To this extraordinary record of progressive 
legislation must be added an intelligent statute 
regulating the cold storage of food; legislation 
estabhshing the indeterminate sentence in place 
of the old discredited fixed sentence; and the 



204 WOODROW WILSON 

complete reorganization of the public school 
system. 

It is worthy of special remark that the achieve- 
ment of these surprising results over and against 
its original opposition left the legislature, never- 
theless, in a very friendly attitude of mmd 
toward the Governor. He earned their respect, 
and he won, to boot, the hearty good-will of 
most of the legislators. At first an atmosphere 
of diffidence hung over the executive anterooms ; 
visitors were not sure how they would be treated. 
But they soon found it a dehght to visit the 
Governor's office, and began to think up ex- 
cuses for a look in. The spare gray man with 
the long jaw had a mighty takmg way about 
him; there was always a ready smile and often 
a lively story, and you seldom failed to go away 
with a glow around your heart. 

The Senators found him out in due course of 
the session one night at a little dinner given him 
and them by the Adjutant-General, Mr. Sadler, 
at the Country Club. There were some darky 
music-makers on hand, and presently the high 
tenor voice that had led two college glee-clubs 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 205 

was caroling in darky dialect, and before long 
(it was in the confidential privacy of a group of 
sympathetic Senators) the rather lengthy legs 
and other members of a Governor were engaged 
in a duet Cakewalk with one of the older Senators. 
Nobody knows how many votes for progressive 
legislation were won that night. 

A very practical imderstanding of human 
nature was, from the. beginning, displayed in the 
gubernatorial dealings with legislators — per- 
haps not a little of it due to the keen political 
sagacity of the Governor's secretary, Joseph P. 
Tumulty, one of the bright young men of the 
state, experienced beyond his years in the ways, 
moods, and foibles of politicians in general and 
legislators in particular. But Mr. Wilson is 
himself the most human of men. He is very 
positive, he can be very indignant, he takes the 
high ground for himself; but he is not vindictive, 
and he knows how to make allowances. 

No retaliation was ever visited upon adver- 
saries of the Governor. Assemblyman Martin 
of Hudson County, for instance, was prominent 
in the fight against Martine; and he was a leader 



206 WOODROW WILSON 

in opposition to the Geran Elections Bill, his 
opposition being doubtless sincerely based on 
his beUef tliat it would destroy the party or- 
ganization. Martin was much interested in a 
bridge bill affecting Hoboken and the north end 
of his county. As the time drew near for action 
upon the bridge bill, he grew very uneasy and 
was observed to be much in the vicinage of the 
Governor's room, inquiring of all and sundry 
who were in communication with the Executive 
whether they thought he would let it go through. 
It was difficult to persuade a man used to the 
customs of the old days that there was a new 
kind of politician in the Governor's chair, a 
politician who dealt with proposed legislation on 
its merits and not in the harboring of vindic- 
tiveness nor the remembrance of promised re- 
ward. Mr. Martin's bridge bill was a just and 
desirable measure, and he got it. When the 
fight for reform in the educational department 
came on, Martin was in the front rank in support 
of the Governor's proposals. 

Ex-Senator Smith, the notorious James, Jr., 
now Mr. Wilson's bitter enemy, owns a great 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 207 

deal of real estate in Newark. His relative and 
chief lieutenant, James R. Nugent, controls the 
city so absolutely that a laborer can't get a job 
on the street without his consent. However, 
there are some things which a New Jersey city 
council has to ask the legislature for permission 
to do. This session there was to come up at 
Trenton a bill allowing the Newark common 
council in its discretion to widen certain streets. 
The improvement would enhance the value of 
realty owned by Smith. It would have been 
the easiest thing in the world for a vindictive 
Governor to have vetoed the bill, on the ground 
that it was a job, and to have won applause for 
his act, while striking a telling blow at Smith and 
Nugent. But, considering the case on its merits. 
Governor Wilson could conclude only that it au- 
thorized a real improvement, irrespective of its ef- 
fect on the Smith property. He signed the bill. 
"Mr. Smith and the Governor do not always 
see precisely eye to eye," was his remark, as he 
laid down the pen, "but that circumstance con- 
stitutes no reason why Mr. Smith should be 
deprived of any of his rights as a citizen." 



208 WOODROW WILSON 

There was one ease, however, in which Mr. 
Wilson violated, unblushingly, his declaration 
that he had no rewards for those who supported 
nor punishment for those who opposed his meas- 
ures. Assemblyman Allan B. Walsh, of Mercer 
County, was a mechanic employed by the Roe- 
bling Company. This corporation, which paid 
Walsh something like three dollars a day for his 
labor in its shops, naturally felt that this sum 
included what service he could render in his 
capacity as a legislator. When the election of 
United States Senator came up he was instructed 
to vote for Smith. He went to the Governor 
and told him how the case stood with him. "I 
quite understand," said the Governor, "and I 
don't want to advise you what to do. I am not 
the man to ask you to imperil your family's 
living. Whatever you conclude to do, I shan't 
hold it against you." 

Something in the common sense and human 
kindliness of Wilson's attitude so touched Walsh, 
not heretofore known as a hero, that he went to 
the caucus and voted for Martine. His work 
was cut till he could make only $10 a week. 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 209 

When the battle was joined on the Wilson legis- 
lative programme, his employers warned him to 
vote against it. He voted for it — Walsh, you 
see, had a man in him — and was discharged. 
The Governor heard of that — and those who 
happened to be in the State House that day 
heard language flow in a vigor drawn from re- 
sources not commonly tapped by Presbyterian 
elders. Walsh was a poor man with a family, 
whose livelihood had been taken away from him 
because he voted according to his conscience. 
"Something must be done for Walsh; we can't 
see him suflfer like this," said Mr. Wilson. He 
was reminded of his declaration that he would 
neither punish nor reward. "No matter what 
I said!" he exclaimed. "This is a good time 
to be inconsistent. We'll find a place for Walsh. " 

So it is a true charge that the present clerk 
of the Mercer County tax board (though indeed 
he is a competent man) owes his position to the 
fact that he voted for Wilson measures in the 
legislature. 

Mr. W^ilson's appointments were for the most 
part wise and happy — some of them remark- 



210 WOODROW WILSON 

ably so. One of the best, in its results, was that 
of Samuel Kalish to the Supreme Court bench. 
Kalish is a Jew, and he happened to be Nugent's 
personal counsel, but neither of these circum- 
stances closed the Governor's eyes to the fact 
that he was able, honorable, vigorous, and 
peculiarly fitted for such work as lay before the 
New Jersey Supreme Court. It is Justice 
Kalish, now sitting in the Atlantic County Cir- 
cuit, who is cleaning up Atlantic City; it was he 
who, finding justice made a joke of in Atlantic 
County by juries picked by the corrupt sheriff, 
turned to the early common law and appointed 
"elisors" to select jurymen. A grand jury thus 
obtained indicted the sheriff, and the work of 
bringing the big resort under subjection to law 
goes thrivingly on. Justice Swayze, who was 
prominently mentioned for a place on the United 
States Supreme bench, has resorted to Justice 
Kalish's "elisors" in dealing with corrupt 
political conditions in Hudson County. 

New Jersey elects its Assembly anew each 
year. In the autumn of 1911 Governor Wilson 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 211 

went before the people to ask for the return of 
men pledged to sustain the accomplished leg- 
islation and to support what further progressive 
measures should come up. For the first time, a 
primary was held under the Geran law. The 
Smith-Nugent influence was frantically exerted 
everywhere to nominate an ti- Wilson men. It 
failed, failed utterly, everywhere except in Essex 
County — the home of the ex-Senator and his 
lieutenant. For the first time a Geran law con- 
vention was held. The Wilson men controled 
it. A sound platform was adopted. In Essex, 
the Smith-Nugent machine won the primary, 
nominating a ticket expressly chosen in antag- 
onism to the Governor. 

In the campaign that followed. Governor 
Wilson visited every county in the state except 
Essex. He canceled his engagement for that 
county, refusing to ask support for the Smith 
ticket. 

The result of the election has been twisted by 
opponents of Mr. Wilson into a defeat for him. 
It was, in fact, a signal victory — a striking 
endorsement. In all the state outside of Essex, 



212 WOODROW WILSON 

ill the counties, that is, where he asked support 
lor Democratic candidates for the Assembly, 
their majorities aggregated 857 votes more than 
they did the previous year, when the state was 
ablwre loith the excitement of a gubernatorial 
campaign. In Essex, which he refused to visit, 
in Essex, where the Democratic candidates were 
pledged anti-Wilson men, the Democratic vote 
fell off 12,000 and the Republicans won. 

It is clear enough, certainly, whether this is 
repudiation or endorsement. What happened 
was simply this: Smith and Nugent, who, like 
minority party bosses generally, expect to re- 
ceive help occasionally from the opposite party 
and more frequently to give it, turned a very 
common trick. They nominated the weakest 
possible ticket and then left it to the fate they 
expected it to meet. They gave the legislature 
back to the Republicans, for the sake of being 
able to raise the cry that the state had repu- 
diated Wilson. Few were deceived by such a 
play. 

The Assembly is Republican again, it is true 
— made so by Smith's treachery — but among 



I 



t 



A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNOR 213 

the Republicans are enough progressive men to 
sustain what has been done and probably to 
support new measures of public good. In a 
statement issued immediately after the election, 
Governor Wilson called upon them in the name 
of the pledges of their own platform, to co- 
operate in ** reforms planned in the interest of 
the whole state which we are sworn to serve." 



CHAPTER XII 

THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 

IN THE spring of 1911 it became evident 
that a sentiment looking toward Mr. 
Wilson's nomination for the Presidency 
was abroad in the nation. The suggestion had 
been made long ago — several years ago — but 
it had had no more than faint interest till the 
Governor's masterful grapple with the difficul- 
ties of practical politics at the New Jersey capital 
had focused country -wide attention upon him, 
and led to the general discovery of his grasp of 
political problems, the vigor and originality of 
his thought, and his devotion to the cause of 
government by the people. In all parts of the 
Union, from its populous Eastern cities to re- 
mote corners of the West, people seemed sud- 
denly to become aware that there was a man 
named Wilson who looked more like a great 
man than any who had been seen of late days. 

214 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 215 

Letters began coming into Trenton and Prince- 
ton until they could no longer be read, not to 
speak of being answered; newspaper clippings 
by the bushel basket. 

The time soon came when invitations to 
speak in cities clamorous to see and hear grew 
so insistent that it would have been vain pride 
longer to disregard them. A few friends took 
it upon themselves to arrange an itinerary among 
some of the cities that wanted to see New Jer- 
sey's Governor, and he put himself in their 
hands to the extent of agreeing to get on a train 
with the itinerary in his pocket and fare forth 
toward the nearest point at least. 

Before he returned he had traveled 8,000 
miles, made twenty-lBve speeches, addressed 
thousands of people, and been acclaimed in 
eight states as the next President. Stopping 
to rest over-night at Washington, as he neared 
home, the hotel to which he went was besieged 
by Senators and Representatives come to make, 
or renew, acquaintance with the man about 
whom the whole country was talking. 

That was the beginning of it. On his Western 



216 WOODROW WILSON 

journey Mr. Wilson had replied to all questions 
by saying that the Presidency was too big a 
thing for any man to set about to capture, as it 
was too big for any man to refuse. Now, how- 
ever, there set in a spontaneous movement 
which over-night made him a candidate, willy- 
nilly, and which within a few weeks had put his 
name apparently ahead of all others in popular 
favor — for the movement was distinctly a 
movement rather of citizens than of politicians, 
rather of the people than of party leaders. To 
answer the constant demands of the newspapers 
for information, a press bureau was established, 
its modest expenses met by the chipping-in of 
personal friends, many of them Princetonians. 
The state committee of his party — which had 
thrown off the old domination and was now a 
group of freed and enthusiastic men — an- 
nounced New Jersey's Governor as her choice 
for the Presidency and opened headquarters in 
Trenton to promote his nomination. 

Early in January, 1912, Governor Wilson was 
present as a guest at the Jackson Day banquet, 
attended by all the members of the Democratic 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 217 

National Committee and the most prominent 
men of the party from all over the country, 
gathered in Washington; and there made an 
address so commanding in power that he fairly 
swept the 800 off their feet with the vision of 
duty and opportunity which beckoned the 
party of the people in this hour of national crisis. 
From that day Mr. Wilson's life has been 
lived in the full light of publicity. The press 
has given a daily record of his acts and words 
— and has brought to an end the work of this 
biography, whose purpose it has been to trace 
the course of not widely known events which, in 
ways unusual in our political history, has singu- 
larly equipped Woodrow Wilson for a chief part 
in the political life of the nation. 

So brief a narrative as this could reveal but 
imperfectly the personality whose development 
it essayed to trace; nor could any assessment of 
it, in closing, do much to remedy the imper- 
fection. Some few matters of fact might be 
added a httle to round out the picture: 

Mr. Wilson's face, photographed in repose, is 



218 WOODROW WILSON 

familiar; but it is not the same face, animated; 
his photographs do not show the man whom his 
friends know. The hnes of sadness which mark 
the photographs disappear in conversation, in 
pubhc speech. A suffusion of kindhness over- 
flows his countenance the moment his attention 
is drawn; swift play of expression marks the 
interest with which he listens. His laugh, like 
that of the reprobate whom Mark Twain en- 
gaged to applaud during his first lecture, is 
hung on a hair-trigger. He resents the sug- 
gestion that his profile is remarkably like that of 
Joseph Chamberlain as that British statesman 
(whom he despises) was in after days, but it is. 

Mr. Wilson is of good height, sturdily built, 
with square shoulders ; he stands erect and on his 
feet. If you want mannerisms, you note that 
his hands seek his trousers pockets, that he 
changes his glasses with much care when he 
looks down at a document or up from it; that 
every time he has used his pen he wipes it care- 
fully with a cloth taken from a drawer, into 
which he painstakingly replaces it, closing the 
drawer. There is a certain trained precision of 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 219 

habit in matters of routine — and a free spon- 
taneity in others. There would be a gray grim- 
ness about him except for the pocketed hands, a 
frequent sunburst of a smile, and a voice like 
music. You would learn, if you watched him an 
hour or two, that a man with a stiff jaw and a 
sensitive mouth is pretty sure to be master in 
any situation. Governor Wilson is a man of 
positive opinion, relieved by an eager sense of 
humor. He moves and speaks with unfailing 
poise, with good-natured certainty of himself. 

The prime thing is that he is real — real all 
through, from top to bottom. There isn't a 
sham anywhere in his neighborhood. His mind 
is constitutionally incapable of tolerating un- 
reality — it revolts against it like a nauseated 
stomach. Another thing is that he is good- 
humored. He is chock-full of energy; he likes 
action, hugely, though he did remark at the 
end of one exciting day: ''After all, life doesn't 
consist in eternally running to a fire!" Con- 
versation with him is a delight; his talk is rich 
in allusion, illustrated from broad personal 
acquaintance, marked by a wide-ranging sweep 



220 WOODROW WILSON 

of interest and thought. Yet he Hkes a good 
story and an occasional emphatic word. 

It might be mentioned that Mr. Wilson's 
family consists of his wife and three daughters: 
Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor. New Jersey 
having no residence for its executive head, the 
Governor continues to reside at Princeton, in a 
pretty house on a quiet street. Trenton is but 
eleven miles distant, and he is at his desk in the 
State House much more than any of his pred- 
ecessors ever was. 

There, in the copper-domed Capitol, his re- 
ception-room is constantly filled with visitors; 
he works, sees callers, and holds conferences in 
an inner room — the door, however, to w^hich 
stands always open. Be the weather cold or 
not, any one can walk, without touching a door- 
knob, from the street into the Governor's 
inner room. 

It is a pleasant enough room, this inner ofiice, 
looking out over the river; none too luxuriously 
furnished in light wood, with a mahogany tall- 
clock in a corner, a calendar with an advertise- 
ment on it on the wall, a tiny brass fireplace. 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 221 

and mantel supporting a bronze Washington in 
a Roman toga and a Lincoln in a piratical 
cloak. Solemn portraits of former Governors 
hang in melancholy rows here and on every 
available wall of the executive wing of the 
building. 

Governor Wilson is an indefatigable worker, 
used to long hours at the desk. During his 
first year in office he amazed the State House. 
It was bad enough in the spring, but worse when 
summer came and the Governor was still to be 
found during the hottest weather constantly at 
the Capitol, in the burning city. Passersby on 
the street caught glimpses of the Governor in his 
shirt-sleeves working hard way into the night. 
On one of the hottest nights in July Adjutant- 
General Sadler, passing about midnight in his 
automobile, saw the Governor's light burning; 
dismounting and making his way into the room, 
he presented himself as a representative of the 
State House Union, complaining that members 
had no right to work overtime, and tried his best 
to take the worker out for a motor-ride in the 
moonlit night. But it was no go. There was 



222 WOODROW WILSON 

work to be done, so the Governor worked on 
alone and toward morning made his way to the 
little room in the Hotel Sterling which he oc- 
cupied when detained in the city. 

This biography has found no time to dwell, 
as it would like to have dwelt, on many of the 
enlarging and enriching, though undramatic, 
events of the scholar's life: on holidays in 
Europe; on the preparation for the writing of 
books, such as the ''Life of George Washington" 
and the monumental ''History of the American 
People." 

It could not tell of the happiness of his family 
life. It has not hinted at his shyness, that love 
of retirement, inherited with the strain of his 
mother's blood, which had to be overcome, with 
agonizing, before he could commit himself to 
the path of public life, and which still makes 
the knocking at a strange door or the reception 
of a new caller a real, though never a percep- 
tible, effort. 

It has not told of his passion for crowds, of 
his fondest habit — the stealing off somewhere 
to move, unknown, among big throngs, and to 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 223 

drink in, in silence, the sense of human striving, 
to look into the faces of multitudes and listen 
to their voices, one to another; to feel the heart- 
beat of men, as they go about life's business or 
its pleasures. 

It is a rare and an arresting combination of 
traits that this man presents. Perhaps nothing 
sums it up more vividly than this: he reads 
Greek, and he writes — short-hand. That was 
one of the first things that amazed the people at 
Trenton — the old-timers who deemed them- 
selves the only *' practical" politicians. But 
every day for a year was a further amazement 
to them. They found in this strange newcomer 
a man who didn't believe that a good cause 
was rendered any less likely to succeed by the 
employment in its behalf of the carnal weapons 
of practical politics — a man who said: *'Even 
a reformer need not be a fool." 

A new era was ushered in when this quiet gen- 
tleman who had just emerged from the delectable 
groves of Princeton's academy, his garments 
odorous with the vapors of Parnassus, his lips wet 
with the waters of Helicon — this long-haired 



224 . WOODROW WILSON 

bookworm of a professor who had just laid his 
spectacles on his dictionary, came down to the 
Trenton State House and ''hcked the gang to a 
frazzle." It appeared that he did know the 
difference between a seminar and a caucus, a 
syllabus and a New Jersey corporation — that 
he did know Hoboken and Camden politics 
pretty nearly as well as he did his Burke and his 
Bagehot; and that, able to write a book on 
"Constitutional Government," he was just as 
able to handle a Governor's job constitution- 
ally or otherwise, according to your view of the 
constitution. 

As to constitutions, he does not have for them 
altogether that kind of regard which the super- 
stitious have for a fetich. They do say that he 
was once so irreverent as to remark of some of 
the provisions of a certain ancient document, 
"They're outgrown, that's all. If you button 
them over the belly, they split up the back!" 
Yet no man could be more jealous of the prin- 
ciples of which the Constitution is the expression. 

Of his manner of public speech, something more 
ought to be told. With the advent of Woodrow 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 225 

Wilson on the political stage came a new type 
of man and a new type of oratory. Mr. Wilson 
has long been known as an exquisite master of 
English prose. He speaks as he writes — with 
a trained and skilful handling of the resources of 
the language, a sureness, an accuracy, a power, 
and a delicacy surpassing anything ever before 
heard on the political platform in America. It 
was felt by some of his friends that Mr. Wilson's 
classical habit of language would militate against 
his success as a politician — it was felt to be a 
matter of extreme doubt whether he could use a 
language understanded of the people. The first 
appearance of the candidate for the Jersey gover- 
norship dissipated these doubts. Mr. Wilson 
knew how to talk to the people, knew how to 
win them. He changed his manner very little, 
never stooping, as if he had to, to make the 
people understand. No matter where or before 
what sort of audience he spoke, his speeches were 
on a high plane, but they were so clear, so def- 
inite, that every man understood and wondered 
why he had not thought of that himself. 

Governor Wilson is not only the most intel- 



226 WOODROW WILSON 

lectual speaker that this generation has seen on 
the stump ; he is the most engaging. A friendly 
smile is almost always on his face — always in 
beginning, at any rate. His words come with 
vigor, but with a gentle good-nature, too — not a 
good-natured tolerance of the ills he is opposing, 
but a good-natured confidence that they will 
soon be overthrown. A serene faith in the out- 
come is one of the characteristics of Wilson's 
attitude; he is an optimist, and his speeches 
have the invigorating charm and power of a call 
to join an army which is marching to glorious 
and certain victory. 

Mr. Wilson is a great story-teller — in private 
he keeps his friends in hours-long gales of 
laughter; he uses simple words and strong words, 
but seldom slang. He loves nonsense verse and 
limericks, and often reels them off while he is 
getting acquainted with his audience — for he 
talks with an audience, not to it. Mr. Wilson, 
as has been said, has a strongly individual face; 
some people would call him homely. He was 
under no illusion about that matter himself; 
he told the people during his campaign for the 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 227 

governorship that they might as well prepare 
themselves for a busy governor, for the Lord 
never intended him to be ornamental. "Yes," 
he remarked once, 

"For beauty I am not a star; 
There are others handsomer, far; 

But my face — I don't mind it, 

For I am behind it; 
'Tis the people in front that I jar!" 

Burke is Mr. Wilson's favorite orator and, to 
some degree, has been his model. No man in 
our time has carried the discussion of public 
questions to so high a level of thought; his argu- 
ments and appeals move in the higher airs. 
The members of a Democratic Club at an an- 
nual dinner are at first a little puzzled to listen to 
an exposition such as Origen, Augustine, or 
Hegel might make of the philosophical nature of 
liberty, namely, that it consists in the adjust- 
ment of the parts of a harmonious whole. But 
bewilderment soon passes into the conviction 
at least that they are listening to a man who has 
thought things out; and when he comes to speak 
of the matters whereof they know, and speaks in 



228 WOODROW WILSON 

a logic perfect and clear and onward moving 
— toward conclusions which at last shine out 
white-hot in the fire of moral conviction, it is 
with a tempest of enthusiasm that they shout 
their understanding. Those were truly re- 
markable effects that were provoked during the 
campaign all over New Jersey and that have 
been accomplished in cities elsewhere since, by 
the prophet-like utterances of this foe of priv- 
ilege, this leader of revolt against the usurpers 
of the people's power. 

He speaks without notes. His voice is full, 
rich, and far-carrying. He gestures freely. 
His utterance flows easily in clean-cut channels, 
and goes home in clear, strong sentences. He 
is a master of statement; his brain works as if 
it had been taken out, cleaned, and oiled that 
day. It was no exceptional testimonial that 
was given by a laborer of Cartaret, N. J., who 
went out of the hall saying, "He handed out a 
cracker jack line of talk, all right.' 

That he enjoys it, is clear. A man in the 
audience at Lakewood called out, "Oh! you're 
only an amateur politican!" 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 229 

''Yes, that is too bad, isn't it! But I have 
one satisfaction: a professional plays the game, 
you know, because it pays him. An amateur 
plays the game because he loves to play it, to win 
it if he can by fair means in a fair field, before 
the eyes of all men. I'm afraid I'm only an 
amateur. But I'm having a most interesting 
time of it!" 

This is the way he speaks : 

"Back of all reform, lies the means of getting it. Back 
of the question what you want, is the question how are you 
going to get it. We are all pretty well agreed, I take it, 
that certain reforms are needed. But we find that the 
first necessary reform is one that will render us able to get 
reform." 

"We have been calling our Government a Republic 
and we have been living under the delusion that it is a 
representative government. That is the theory. But the 
fact is that we are not living under a representative gov- 
ernment; we are living under a government of party bosses 
who in secret conference and for their private ends deter- 
mine what we shall and shall not have. The first, the 
immediate thing that we have got to do is to restore repre- 
sejitative government. There has got to be a popular re- 
bellion for the reconquest and reassumption by the people 



230 WOODROW WILSON 

of the rights of the people, too long surrendered. We 
have got to revolutionze our political machinery, first of 
all. I am a radical, and the first element of my radical- 
ism is, let's get at the root of the whole thing and resume 
popular government. Let's make possible the access of 
the people to the execution of their purposes.'^ 

"I tell you the people of this state and this country are 
determined at last to take over the control of their own 
politics. We are going to cut down the jungle in which 
corruption lurks. We are going to drag things into the 
light, break down private understandings and force them 
to be public understandings. We mean to have the kind 
of government we thought we had." 

" . . . It is time that we served notice on the men 
who have grown up in the possession of privileges and 
bounties, that the existing order of things is to be changed. 
It is only fair that we warn them, for they should have 
time to adjust themselves to the change; but the change 
must come, nevertheless. And this change is not a 
revolution, let it be understood at once. It is merely a 
restoration. . . . That is what the people of New 
Jersey have meant as they have flocked out, rain or shine, 
not to follow the Democratic party — we have stopped 
thinking about parties — to follow what they now know 
as the Democratic idea, the idea that the people are at last 
to be served.'* 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP 231 

*'Do you know what the American people are waiting 
for, gentlemen? Tlicy are waiting to have their politics 
utterly simplified. They are realizing that our politics 
are full of secret conferences, that there are private ar- 
rangements, and they do not understand it. They want 
to concentrate their force somewhere. They are like an 
unorganized army saying the thing is wrong. Where 
shall we congregate? How shall we organize? Who are 
the captains? Where are the orders? Which Is the 
direction? Where are the instruments of government? 
That is what they are waiting for." 

*'It is an opportunity, a^;^ ii is a terriuic opportunity. 
Don't you know tiiat some man without conscience, who 
did not care for the iiacion,_couid put this country into a 
flame? Don't you know that the people of this country 
from one end to the other ail br eve that something is 
wrong? What an opportunity it ould be for some man 
without conscience, but with po- r, to spring up and say: 
*This is the way: follow me' and lead them in paths of 
destruction. How terrible it would be!" 

". . . I a)ii accused of being a radical. If to seek 
to go to the root is to be a radical, a radical I am. After 
all, everything that flowers in beauty in the air of heaven 
draws its fairness, its vigor, from its roots. Nothing liv- 
ing can blossom into fruitage unless through nourishing 
stalks deep-planted in the common soil. Up from that 



232 WOODROW WILSON 

soil, up from the silent bosom of the earth, rise the currents 
of life and energy. Up from the common soil, up from the 
quiet heart of the people, rise joyously to-day streams of 
hope and determination bound to renew the face of the 
earth in glory. 

"I tell you the so-called radicalism of our times is 
simply the eflFort of nature to release the generous energies 
of our people. This great American people is at bottom 
just, virtuous, and hopeful; the roots of its being are in the 
soil of what is lovely, pure, and of good report; and the 
need of the hour is just that radicalism that will clear a 
way for the realization of the aspirations of a sturdy race." 

No one can listen to Woodrow Wilson and 
see the emotions of the audiences of earnest men 
who hang upon his words, without feeling that 
he is witnessing the beginning of a political 
revolution, and that its prophet and captain 
stands before him. This is a new language — 
but one for which the people have an instinctive, 
Pentecostal understanding. 

It is surely an interesting prospect held out 
by this taking of the centre of the stage of 
national politics by a man made up of the com- 
bination of qualities which Woodrow W^ilson 
possesses. It is the combination of the gentle- 



THE PRESIDENCY LOOMS UP «8» 

man and scholar — and the practical politican. 
Imagine a student of goverament one of the most 
eminent that America has produced; a man of 
rich literary and ethical culture; of the fine 
fibre and mellow spirit that our ancient uni- 
versities still occasionally shelter and develop; a 
man of humanity, with a heart not unvisited 
by emotions — who is yet able to go into the 
sordid battle of politics, face the ^'mean knighta'' 
like a Lancelot, keep his temper, crack his joke» 
and win. Imagine a type of culture in its finest 
flower, and then add to his endowment, tact, 
method, eflSciency, a shrewd knowledge of men, 
a sense of humor, a passion for facts, a zest for 
constructive work, and an instinct for leader- 
ship — and you begin to get something like a 
picture of the remarkable man whose history, 
now but entered upon, this biography has so 
inadequately narrated, and whose personality it 
has so imperfectly portrayed. 

THE END 



V 



.JA- 



